“Despite a few scares, there is no evidence of any cyberattacks against election infrastructure Tuesday, DHS officials said. As expected, federal officials spent much of the day chasing down anomalies that appeared to have a cyber angle, though all turned out to be typical malfunctions or accidents. For example, in several states earlier in the day, voters were receiving text messages reminding them to ‘vote tomorrow’—a day late. The text messages were reported to Homeland Security officials who determined that a flaw in a third-party provider’s API sent the message a day later than intended. Another official offered a hypothetical example to watch for tonight on state and local election websites, where unofficial results will be posted. ‘The resource requests that will be descending upon those pages in some cases may exceed their current capacity,’ causing the page to crash from too much traffic, the official said. ‘Don’t automatically assume that it’s a [distributed denial-of-service] attack by a malicious actor, by the Russians, whatever. In some cases, it is just a technical configuration of those websites.’”
Source: DHS Cyber Unit Fields False Alarms But No Hacks on Election Day – Nextgov
