News is breaking that a Mexican campaign site was hit with a DDoS attack during the final presidential debate–just weeks ahead of the July 1 election.
The affected site, run by the National Action Party (PAN), targets front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, but his party denies any involvement with the outage. The majority of traffic that caused the outage supposedly came from Russia and China, which may or may not correlate with the origin of the attack.
There are currently no clear signs of foreign hacking in Mexican campaigns, but tensions and nerves are high following the U.S. probe into Russia’s 2016 election meddling.
Jeannie Warner, Security Manager at Leading Application Security Provider WhiteHat Security, commented on the trend of DDoS attacks during election periods below.
Jeannie Warner, Security Manager at WhiteHat Security:
“DDoS is preventable through runtime application self-protection (RASP) or web application firewall (WAF) technology. I believe all critical services and applications fronting PII or transactional information should have some sort of application protection beyond what a next-generation firewall (NGFW) or intrusion prevention system (IPS) can offer. Additionally, because the DDoS absolutely can distract from a secondary attack, especially as an attempt to ‘cover the tracks’ of something invasive, it’s critical that all states and countries start prioritizing the hardening of anything having to do with the voting system.”
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