Mississippi was the target of a sustained cyber attack on election day

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – Hackers made Mississippi certainly one of their election-day targets. However officers say it didn’t impression votes.

Nonetheless, it stored lots of you from accessing polling place data on one of many state web sites.

You’d anticipate the Secretary of State’s web site to be a well-liked on-line vacation spot on election day. However Tuesday afternoon, Secretary Michael Watson was notified that it was removed from regular.

“We began seeing a spike in site visitors hitting our web site, and principally what it’s known as a DDoS assault,” mentioned Watson. “It principally takes your web site down, and we noticed built-in servers forwards and backwards, we’d get again up, then they might examine once more and push it again down.”

However you need to know, this isn’t the primary time one thing like this has occurred.

“We noticed this assault occur or a type of it occurred a few weeks again, which was an incredible factor as a result of we had been ready doubly so this time,” defined Watson. “That was some out-of-country site visitors. This time, what we’re being informed is the site visitors was spoofed, which implies they cowl their tracks principally. We did see some data on the market a pro-Russia group claims credit score for doing so I wish to make it possible for we get all of the details earlier than we are saying something…who did what. However once more, it’s essential to have trusted data and we wish to ensure you get the details earlier than we are saying the rest.”

Watson admits there are hacking makes an attempt on the system every day however when requested concerning the timing of this newest one…

“There’s some totally different ideas on the market,” he famous. “Possibly the one which occurred a couple of weeks in the past was to check our vulnerability. ‘Is that this one thing that we are able to do?’ After which, hey, by the best way, let’s get able to go on election day. I’m not so positive that that’s the case. However I do know once more that it was Election Day. So it definitely seems to be suspicious that it was geared toward our election system right here in Mississippi.”

Backside line is that Watson says whereas it stored some from accessing polling place data, your private data wasn’t compromised.

“That was the public-facing facet, nothing behind the public-facing facet was impacted,” Watson added. “The election was protected.”

We had been informed different state web sites had been impacted and requested data from the Mississippi Division of Data Know-how Providers.

“We have now obtained quite a few inquiries concerning the intermittent web site outages throughout the state community yesterday,” mentioned Tommy Goodwin, Chief Administrative Officer for the Mississippi Division of Data Know-how Providers. “These outages had been the results of a rise in DDoS exercise. We labored diligently to include extra mechanisms to revive entry to make sure that our residents may retrieve the data obtainable on our web sites. As a result of delicate and significant nature of those mitigations, we proceed to cooperate with our federal companions at Homeland Safety and CISA to share intelligence associated to this exercise.”

The Secretary of State has additionally added this assertion to his web site.

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