The Mississippi Secretary of State website was one of several Mississippi state websites to be the target of a sustained cyber attack Tuesday, officials confirmed Tuesday evening. The sites were periodically offline after a Russian hacker group “named the state as a target to knock offline,” according to NBC News. CISA officials confirmed the Secretary of State’s site “has been under a sustained DDoS,” according to NBC, and while other states had been targeted, there were no sustained outages elsewhere. The site is among the key portals of information for residents on how and where to vote in Tuesday’s midterm election. While Elizabeth Jonson, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office would not confirm the cause or source to NBC, she said the attacks began shortly after 1 p.m. ET. NBC said a Russian hacker group posted a call on its Telegram channel at around the same time to attack a web address that “is part of the Mississippi secretary of state website.” The group are experts at DDoS attacks—direct denial of service attacks—which shut a site down by overloading it with traffic.
