With Election Day approaching, local governments need to be prepared for malware attacks on election infrastructure.
Ransomware gangs have officially entered the 2020 election fray, with reports of one of the first breaches of the voting season, on Hall County, Ga. The county’s database of voter signatures was impacted in the attack along with other government systems.
Although the county said the voting process hasn’t been impacted by the ransomware attack, the incident is a warning to other municipalities to lock down their systems, particularly in these last days leading up to the election.
Hall County sits about an hour north of Atlanta and first reported the attack on Oct. 7.
Ransomware attacks involve a criminal introducing malware into the target’s systems, which then takes over an organization’s data and encrypts it until a ransom is paid.
Hall County’s Ransomware Attack
On Oct. 21, the Gainesville Times reported the county’s precinct map was down as a result of a ransomware attack, in addition to a voter-signature database.
It wasn’t until Oct. 22 that the county announced, “The voting process for citizens has not been impacted by the attack.”
“A ransomware attack has occurred involving critical systems within the Hall County government networks, including an interruption of phone services,” according to a news release. “As soon as it occurred, the county began working to investigate the cause, to restore operations and determine the effects of the incident.”
Hall County registration coordinator Kay Wimpye old the paper that some of the systems are already back up and running and if there is a question about a ballot signature, county employees are still able to pull voter-registration cards manually. But with record numbers of mail-in ballots being submitted, that could prove to be a time-consuming process.
Wimpye told the Times that her office sent out 27,573 absentee ballots as of Oct. 21, and 11,351 had been sent back. The Georgia Secretary of State reported that by Oct. 21, 2016, 103,239 mail-in ballots had been returned, compared to 805,442 on the same day in 2020, showing an explosion in the number of voters opting for mail-in voting this election cycle. Although the signatures are being verified now, the ballots won’t be tabulated until Election Day, according to the Times.
https://threatpost.com/georgia-election-data-ransomware/160499/