Top DHS official says no ‘malicious cyber activity’ seen on Super Tuesday

A senior official at the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) cyber agency said Tuesday night that they had not seen any “malicious cyber activity” aimed at disrupting elections during primary voting in 14 states.

“We don’t have any reports of any malicious cyber activity across the states today,” the senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told reporters. 

The official noted that while there were some “sporadic” information technology (IT) issues, all the election systems were able to get “back up and running” with no issues due to targeting by hackers.

One IT incident the official pointed to was in California, where the secretary of state’s website was briefly brought down by what the office tweeted was “higher than normal traffic” and not hacking activity.

CISA ran a national cybersecurity awareness room on Election Day to track threats to elections and coordinate information sharing officials at all levels of government. Coming out of this experience, the official said there were “more opportunities to learn and continue to improve” on election security coordination ahead of the November elections.

The same CISA official told reporters earlier on Tuesday that there was “constant” and “low level” disinformation activity seen on social media but that the agency had not observed a spike in disinformation associated with Election Day.

On Tuesday night, the official said that there was “no change” in the amount of misinformation seen.

CISA is one of the key agencies that works with state and local election officials on election security, an issue that has been permanently in the spotlight in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

CISA Director Christopher Krebs joined the leaders of seven other federal agencies in issuing a statement ahead of Super Tuesday warning of disinformation threats to elections and asking voters to be aware of this issue.

“Our Departments and Agencies are working together in an unprecedented level of commitment and effort to protect our elections and to counter malign foreign influence, but voters have a role to play too,” the officials said Monday.