At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. As we look to the upcoming 2020 U.S. elections, we are reminded that having the Internet be trusted, secure, reliable, and accessible for campaigns and citizens alike is critical to our democracy. We rely on the Internet to share and discover pertinent information such as how to register to vote, find polling locations, or learn more about candidates.

Due to the spread of COVID-19, we are seeing a number of election environments shift online, to varying degrees, with political parties conducting virtual fundraisers, campaigns moving town halls to online platforms and election officials using online forms to facilitate voting by mail. As the 2020 U.S. elections approach, we want to ensure that players in the election space have the tools they need to stay online to promote trust and confidence in the democratic system.

We’re keeping an eye on how this shift to online activities affect cyberattacks. From April to June 2020, for example, we saw a trend of increasing DDoS attacks, with double the amount of L3/4 attacks observed over our network compared to the first three months of 2020. In the election space, we are tracking trends and vulnerabilities to better understand the threats against these critical players. Our goal is to use the information to create best practices for election and campaign officials so they can be better prepared for the upcoming elections.

Key Takeaways:

• When comparing types of attacks against campaigns and government election sites, we saw the exact inverse type of attacks with political campaigns experiencing more DDoS attacks while government sites experiencing more attempts to exploit security vulnerabilities.
• On average, state and local government election sites experience 122,475 cyber threats per day with an average of 199 SQL injection attempts per day.
• On average, political campaigns experience 4,949 cyber threats per day, although larger campaigns may see far more.

#athenian project #election security #elections #security