While they might hinder access to information, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against election infrastructure won’t prevent voting, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in an alert issued this week.
DDoS attacks would either slow down election-related public-facing websites or render them inaccessible, thus preventing voters from staying updated with voting information or from accessing voting results.
Such attacks are meant to disrupt activities for a period of time through flooding Internet-accessible servers with requests and preventing legitimate users from connecting to online resources, such as online accounts or websites.
“The public should be aware that if foreign actors or cyber criminals were able to successfully conduct DDoS attacks against election infrastructure, the underlying data and internal systems would remain uncompromised, and anyone eligible to vote would still be able to cast a ballot,” the FBI and CISA note.
Furthermore, the two agencies warn that threat actors might falsely claim that they successfully compromised voting systems through DDoS attacks and that they were able to prevent voters from casting their ballots or that they managed to modify already-cast votes.
Such disinformation attempts, the two agencies say, would undermine the public’s trust in the country’s democratic institutions and seek to discredit the electoral process. Two other similar alerts issued over the past couple of weeks warn of disinformation regarding the security of voting systems and the validity of election results.
“The FBI and CISA have no reporting to suggest a DDoS attack has ever prevented a registered voter from casting a ballot, or compromised the integrity of any ballo ..
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