Two federal agencies have alerted voters to the possibility of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting election infrastructure used for the upcoming November 2024 elections. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a public service announcement detailing what such attacks might involve.
According to the agencies, DDoS attacks could disrupt access to websites that provide voting information, online election services, or unofficial election results by overwhelming them with excessive traffic. CISA Senior Advisor Cait Conley emphasized that while DDoS attacks could cause temporary interruptions and delay information dissemination, they will not impact the security or integrity of the election process itself.
Conley noted that DDoS attacks are a known tactic and might be used by foreign adversaries or cybercriminals to sow doubt about election systems. FBI Deputy Assistant Director Cynthia Kaiser described DDoS attacks as relatively low-level threats and anticipated that similar disruptions, such as outages of voter lookup tools, could occur. She also explained that there continues to be false claims made by threat actors regarding DDoS occurrences in previous U.S. and foreign elections.
The FBI and CISA stated that there is no evidence suggesting that DDoS attacks have ever prevented eligible voters from casting ballots, compromised ballot integrity, or disrupted vote tabulation and result transmission. They highlighted that previous incidents, such as the 2022 DDoS attacks on Mississippi state websites, did not affect the election system's integrity.
Experts warn that modern DDoS attacks are becoming more sophisticated, often involving large botnets of compromised IoT devices that can target multiple infrastructures simultaneously.
Read the CISA/FBI public service announcement here.
