EXCLUSIVE: State hit by largest sustained Election Day cyberattack warns ‘it’s only going to get worse’
In first interview about DDoS attack, top Mississippi election administrator says no votes affected.
In first interview about DDoS attack, top Mississippi election administrator says no votes affected.
In first interview about DDoS attack, top Mississippi election administrator says no votes affected.
The longest sustained cyberattack against election websites in America on Election Day did not affect any votes but caused disruptions to voters’ efforts to determine their polling locations and access other information, Michael Watson, Mississippi’s secretary of state, said in his first interview about the attack.
Watson, the state’s top election administrator, told Hearst Television’s National Investigative Unit in an exclusive interview that the distributed denial-of-service attack, known as DDoS, used multiple spoofed addresses to surge bogus traffic to the webpages, causing an outage that stretched for hours on Election Day.
“Our system was safe, secure and maintained that throughout this attack,” Watson told Hearst Television Wednesday afternoon.
Federal cyber officials that the Mississippi cyber attack was one in a “handful” of states now under investigation, but they did not yet attribute the attack to any entity or foreign actor.
On Wednesday, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly that her agency has seen “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was any way compromised in any race in the country.”
In Mississippi, “we saw some reports initially that a pro-Russian group was claiming credit for this attack; not exactly sure if that was them yet or not,” Sec. Watson said.
But he did have a warning for local election administrators in Mississippi and other states about future efforts by hackers to disrupt election infrastructure.
“I think it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “They’re going to get more sophisticated. We need the resources to make sure we have the proper technology and sources needed to fight that back.”
Watch the video above for more of Chief National Investigative Correspondent Mark Albert’s exclusive interview with Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson.
