Government officials have been preparing for months to combat cyber intrusions into the November elections. On Tuesday, they said, those efforts paid off.
“We continue to see no specific or credible threat to disrupt election infrastructure, or election day operations,” a senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency told reporters during a press briefing yesterday. The agency established an operations room running through the day, and was in contact with other federal agencies as well as private-sector companies involved in election infrastructure, the official said.
Some distributed denial-of-service attacks against a “handful” of election-related websites were observed, the official said, but not all were successful and most affected sites were re-established quickly. Attacks of this type flood websites with massive amounts of traffic in an attempt to render them inaccessible to users.
Despite the lack of significant attacks, another CISA official said during an earlier briefing the same day that the U.S. has observed efforts from more countries than before to influence the elections, including China. Researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit had earlier claimed that China has attempted to fuel political division and discord. Beijing has previously denied engaging in influence operations.
As for the election itself, experts said that any change in control of Congress between parties was unlikely to have a significant impact on incoming cyber rules around areas such as incident reporting, noting that Republicans had already secured significant concessions in those bills.
“In the vast majority of issues we tackle, it’s bipartisan, so I don’t think the elections will have an impact unless they lead to total gridlock,” said Mark Montgomery, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank. “As long as there’s bills moving and laws being signed I think we’ll still be getting work done."
The biggest change, said Mr. Montgomery, who served as the senior advisor to the chairmen of the influential Cyberspace Solarium Commission, is that a number of heavyweight cyber-focused lawmakers who pushed cyber bills through the legislative process are leaving Congress this year. These include Rep. Jim Langevin (D., R.I.), who also served on the Solarium Commission, and Sen. Rob Portman (R. Ohio). They weren’t standing for re-election.
– James Rundle and Catherine Stupp
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