(The Guardian) Kari Paul reports on apparent cyberattacks in Mississippi and elsewhere that briefly knocked official websites offline: Government and voter information websites in Mississippi were temporarily knocked offline on Tuesday in an apparent cyber attack, officials have confirmed.
Several state websites experienced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, in which hackers flood the servers of a website with traffic and render it non-functional.
A senior official with the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency (CISA) said the agency is tracking a “handful” of similar incidents in other states. Officials said the attacks were not carried out on any voting infrastructure and that no data was compromised. “We have been chatting with them for the last several hours working with some of the vendors to put the mitigations in place,” the official said.
A pro-Russian hacking group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but officials said they had not yet confirmed the origins. “While attribution is inherently difficult, we’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that these are part of a widespread coordinated campaign,” the official said.
Several state websites experienced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, in which hackers flood the servers of a website with traffic and render it non-functional.
A senior official with the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency (CISA) said the agency is tracking a “handful” of similar incidents in other states. Officials said the attacks were not carried out on any voting infrastructure and that no data was compromised. “We have been chatting with them for the last several hours working with some of the vendors to put the mitigations in place,” the official said.
A pro-Russian hacking group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but officials said they had not yet confirmed the origins. “While attribution is inherently difficult, we’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that these are part of a widespread coordinated campaign,” the official said.
