US law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies are reminding the public that the nation's voting systems will remain unaffected by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks as the next presidential election fast approaches.
DDoS attack explained
PSAs from both the FBI and CISA soon followed an eight-hour outage at Microsoft Azure this week, which it admitted yesterday began as a DDoS attack whose impact was actually exacerbated by a "flaw" in the Windows manufacturer's "implementation of our defenses .” The outage disrupted GitHub Codespaces, DocuSign, Microsoft 365, and Minecraft, among others.
It also comes amid a period of heightened public mistrust of IT services, fueled in large part by the major outage catalyzed by the dubious CrowdStrike update.
The joint PSA said that the security of voting systems or adjacent infrastructure would not be affected if a DDoS attack targets them, and the most significant impact that could potentially manifest would be related to access to information.
