According to sources, Mississippi election websites (a Government organization in Mississippi) was hit with a cyber attack. It was first reported on 2022-11-09.
Source 1 | 2022-11-09
“Websites operated by the office of Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson appeared back online Tuesday evening, following an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack that lasted much of Election Day. “
“The office’s public-facing websites, which include information for voters, were unavailable for large parts of the day. The outages had no impact on the casting and counting of votes, state and federal officials said Tuesday.“
““An abnormally large increase in traffic volume due to DDoS activity caused the public facing side of our websites to be periodically inaccessible this afternoon,” read a statement late Tuesday from Watson’s office and the Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services. “We want to be extremely clear and reassure Mississippians our election system is secure and has not been compromised.”“
Source 2 | 2022-11-09
“Hackers made Mississippi one of their election-day targets. But officials say it didn’t impact votes. Still, it kept many of you from accessing polling place information on one of the state websites.“
““We started seeing a spike in traffic hitting our website, and basically what it’s called a DDoS attack,” said Watson. “It basically takes your website down, and we saw integrated servers back and forth, we would get back up, then they would check again and push it back down.” “
““We saw this attack happen or a form of it happened a couple of weeks back, which was a great thing because we were prepared doubly so this time,” explained Watson. “That was some out-of-country traffic. This time, what we’re being told is the traffic was spoofed, which means they cover their tracks basically. We did see some information out there a pro-Russia group claims credit for doing so I want to make sure that we get all the facts before we say anything...who did what. But again, it’s important to have trusted information and we want to make sure you get the facts before we say anything else.” Watson admits there are hacking attempts on the system daily but when asked about the timing of this latest one... “There’s some different thoughts out there,” he noted. “Maybe the one that happened a few weeks ago was to test our vulnerability. ‘Is this something that we can do?’ And then, hey, by the way, let’s get ready to go on election day. I’m not so sure that that’s the case. But I do know again that it was Election Day. So it certainly looks suspicious that it was aimed at our election system here in Mississippi.“
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