CNN —
Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office this month fended off a cyberattack believed to be from a foreign country on the website voters use to request absentee ballots, the agency told CNN.
The state’s cyber defenses, backed by tech company Cloudflare, repulsed hackers’ attempts to take absentee voting websites offline without disrupting voters’ ability to request ballots. .
“It slowed down the system a little bit, but it didn’t stop the system from working,” Gabe Sterling, an official with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, which oversees elections in the battleground state, told CNN.
Sterling said the cyberattack likely came from overseas and had “characteristics of a foreign power or a foreign entity at the behest of a foreign power.”
U.S. officials have not yet publicly confirmed that assessment.
Sterling said in an interview Wednesday that hundreds of thousands of IP addresses from many countries flooded Georgia’s website with fake traffic.
“When we talked to experts, it felt like a follow-up attack: ‘Hey, what would they do if we did this?'” Sterling said.
CNN has reached out to Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based company that protects much of the internet from cyberattacks, for comment.
The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were aware of the cyberattack and worked with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office after the incident, officials told CNN. The FBI declined to comment. CISA referred questions to Georgia officials.
The incident is a reminder that hackers are keenly interested in election-related targets in the final days of the US presidential election. During any given election cycle, various cybercriminals and state-sponsored hacking groups may opportunistically target political activities and election offices for their own purposes.
So far, cyber activity has not disrupted voting or counting. Rather, they often target voters’ perceptions of the democratic process.
Separately from the Georgia incident, Iranian government-affiliated hackers have been hacking election-related websites in several U.S. battleground states in an effort to discover vulnerabilities that could be used to influence the election. Microsoft announced Wednesday that it is investigating and investigating the site.
Georgia election offices are not immune to cyber threats.
Coffee County, Georgia, suffered a cyberattack in April that forced the county to disconnect from the state’s voter registration system as a precaution, CNN previously reported.
