Mississippi officials unable to confirm actors behind election websites cyberattack

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson (R) said on Wednesday that his office is unable to confirm the actors behind a cyberattack that disrupted state election websites on Tuesday, as more evidence is needed to attribute it to any specific group. 

Watson said the attack caused the sites to be “periodically inaccessible,” but was confident that the “election system was not compromised.”

A Russian hacking group reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack. According to USA Today, the group said in a Telegram post that it targeted Mississippi’s state election websites to “hit the section that is directly related to the elections.”

The hackers also said that they would “attack American Democrats as a gift to the Republicans for the elections,” and that their first target is the Democratic National Committee, USA Today reported. 

A senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told reporters that the agency is “certainly aware of the [Russian] claims … but that’s not enough for the federal government to provide attribution.”

Illinois was another state that suffered from a cyberattack on Election Day. The state’s Champaign County Clerk’s Office posted on Facebook that there were some issues with its network and computer server and that it believes they were caused by cyberattacks.

During a background call to reporters on Tuesday, CISA said that it was aware of a “handful” of distributed denial of service attacks that briefly impacted a number of state election websites but wouldn’t specify how many were affected. 

However, a CISA official said not every cyberattack that targeted state election websites on Tuesday was successful, and those sites that were affected were quickly restored.  

The agency also said that it has not seen any evidence suggesting that the attacks were “part of a widespread coordinated campaign.”