Federal Election Commission

Summary

The Federal Election Commission restored its electronic filing system after taking it offline for nearly 41 hours to contain a cyberattack that temporarily concealed spending from major donors. The outage prevented super PACs and other groups from submitting mandatory 24- and 48-hour reports, keeping recent political expenditures out of public view during a period of accelerated campaign spending. Agency officials said a bad actor attempted to breach its systems, prompting the shutdown and requiring users to reset passwords before regaining access. While the commission stated the disruption would not affect voters' ability to cast ballots, the lack of transparency around the cause fueled speculation as hundreds of millions of dollars in outside money flowed in the final stretch of the election cycle.

Motives

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TTPs

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Description

The Federal Election Commission took its electronic filing system offline for nearly 41 hours to contain a cyberattack, restoring the service Wednesday night. The agency posted a notice just after 10 p.m. ET on Monday stating it was investigating a problem that caused major outages across systems that process electronic campaign filings. An FEC officer told campaign compliance firms late Monday that the services were taken offline after a bad actor tried to breach the agency's systems, according to an email reviewed by Reuters. The outage occurred as daily political spending accelerated to its fastest pace in the two-year election cycle. Super PACs and other groups were unable to file mandatory 24- and 48-hour reports showing how much money they were spending to help or hurt candidates. The most recent political spending was kept out of public view during the outage. Campaign finance managers had to reset their passwords before logging in to the system once it was restored. The FEC did not return requests for comment on Wednesday and did not announce details about the cause of the outage. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI both referred questions to the FEC. Reuters could not establish the motive for the hacking effort.

The outage concealed spending from big donors at a time when super PACs and dark money groups spent an average of over $50 million per day the week before the outage, according to OpenSecrets research director Brendan Glavin. More than $250 million in spending was reported on October 20 alone. Campaign watchdog Molly White said there was no visibility into last-minute spending while the filing systems were down, calling it devastating close to the election. Hilary Braseth, executive director of OpenSecrets, stated that disclosure delayed is disclosure denied and that transparency is a fundamental public safeguard. The timing of the hacking attempt so close to the November 3 elections and the FEC's lack of information stirred conspiracy theories throughout the industry. The agency took the system offline to contain the breach and verify that no data had been altered before restoration. The FEC told users that most of the services affected by the outage had been restored. The FEC does not administer US elections, and the outage should have no effect on voters' ability to cast ballots.

Sources

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