There is significant global attention around the upcoming United States election. Through the Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns, Cloudflare is providing free protection from cyber attacks to a significant number of state and local elections' websites, as well as those of federal campaigns.
One of the bedrocks of a democracy is that people need to be able to get access to relevant information to make a choice about the future of their country. This includes information about the candidates up for election; learning about how to register, and how to cast a vote; and obtaining accurate information on the results.
A question that I’ve been increasingly asked these past few months: are cyberattacks going to impact these resources leading up to and on election day?
Internally, we have been closely monitoring attacks on the broader elections and campaign websites and have a team standing by 24x7 to help our current customers as well as state and local governments and eligible political campaigns to protect them at no cost from any cyberattacks they may see.
The good news is that, so far, cyberattacks have not been impacting the websites of campaigns and elections officials we are monitoring and protecting. While we do see some background noise of attacks, they have not interfered in the process so far. The attack traffic is below what we saw in 2016 and below what is typical in elections we have observed in other countries.
But there are still nearly two weeks before election day so our guard is up. We thought it was important to provide a view into how overall traffic to campaign and elections sites is trending as well as a view into the cyberattacks we're observing. To that end, today we're sharing data from our internal monitoring systems publicly through Cloudflare Radar. You can access the special “Election 2020” Radar dashboard here:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/election-2020
The dashboard is updated continuously with information we're tracking on traffic to elections-related sites, both legitimate and from cyberattacks. It is normal to see fluctuations in this traffic depending on the time of day as well as when there will be occasional cyberattacks. So far, nothing here surprises us.
It's important to note that Cloudflare does not see everything. We do not, for instance, have any view into misinformation campaigns that may be on social media. We also do not protect every state and local government or every campaign.
That said, we have Athenian Project participants in more than half of US states — including so-called red states, blue states, purple states, and several of the battleground states. We also have hundreds of federal campaigns that are using us ranging across the political spectrum. While we may not see a targeted cyberattack, given the critical role the web now plays to the election process, we believe we would likely see any wide-spread attacks attempting to disrupt the US elections.
So far, we are not seeing anything that suggests such an attack has impacted the election to date.
Our team will continue to monitor the situation. If any state or local elections agency or campaigns comes under attack, we stand ready to help at no cost through the Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns.
We could not have built Cloudflare into the company it is today without a stable, functional government. In the United States, that process depends on democracy and fair elections not tainted by outside influence like cyberattacks. We believe it is our duty to provide our technology where we can to help ensure this election runs smoothly.