In a joint statement, the agencies noted that there is a very real possibility we may see a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack meant to disrupt the elections. They acknowledge that there is a strong desire by some entities to either interfere directly with the election or cause doubts and undermine confidence in the American election process.
They said the goal of their statement is to draw awareness to the types of attacks we may see as election day approaches. The statement noted: “These low-level attacks, which are expected to continue as we approach the 2024 U.S. general election, could disrupt the availability of some election-related functions, like voter look-up tools or unofficial election night reporting, during the election cycle but will not impact voting itself."
They said that these types of attacks are popular among "hacktivists and cyber criminals seeking to advance a social, political, or ideological cause.”
Is the government trying to convince Americans that votes can’t be compromised and no one should question election results?
The interesting part is how they go out of their way to insist that while these attacks could affect people’s access to information, they will somehow not be able to compromise the integrity of the voting.
"DDoS attacks are one example of a tactic that we have seen used against election infrastructure in the past and will likely see again in the future, but they will NOT affect the security or integrity of the actual election,” CISA Senior Advisor Cait Conley emphasized.
How could they possibly know this with such great confidence in advance without knowing the specifics of such an attack? It almost seems as though they want Americans to believe that even if there is an attack that renders vital election infrastructure unavailable, everything will be fine when it all comes back online, and we should all accept the results without question.
Their statement comes not long after a major outage affected Microsoft Azure. This incident came on the heels of a widely publicized and extensive outage related to a questionable CrowdStrike update that brought air traffic to a standstill, caused some 911 and hospital services to be unavailable, and left businesses unable to operate.
"In the event that foreign actors or cybercriminals conduct DDoS attacks against election infrastructure or other infrastructure supporting election administration, the underlying data and internal systems would remain uncompromised, and anyone eligible to vote would still be able to cast a ballot,” they claimed, adding that cyber actors have said in the past that their attacks could change votes that were already cast or prevent eligible voters from casting their ballot. They added that these attacks have never disrupted the tabulation of votes or the timely transmission of election results.
Foreign adversaries like Iran and China have long been linked to attempts to compromise voting and undermine confidence in the American election process. Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) warned earlier this year that we are less prepared for election interference than we were during the 2020 elections, citing AI and deepfakes as part of the problem, while a recent Mandiant report revealed that influence operations had a high likelihood of playing a role in the election.
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