CISA: No ‘credible threats’ to Super Tuesday voting so far
Digital threats have yet to emerge during the biggest day of the presidential primary calendar, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.
“Speaking to today in particular, we do not have any specific or credible threats to today's election operations,” a senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) official told reporters during a Super Tuesday media briefing.
“We continue to provide around-the-clock support to election infrastructure partners across the country and we stand ready to assist with any security related issues that may arise,” the official added.
Voters in more than a dozen states will hold a presidential nominating contest of some kind today, the largest test of U.S. election infrastructure before November. National security officials have warned for months that the 2024 presidential race could see a variety of foreign adversaries launch cyberattacks or influence operations, possibly with the help of generative artificial intelligence, on the U.S. before Election Day.
The CISA official’s comments came amid significant disruptions on Meta services Tuesday morning.
Organizations that monitor internet traffic confirmed that the social media giant’s various companies — namely Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger — experienced a major drop in traffic.
The outages, which span multiple countries, are related to how users log in to the platforms, internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said.
Note: Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #FacebookDown #InstagramDown #ThreadsDown pic.twitter.com/0yR5mKCoQY
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 5, 2024
“We are aware of the incident,” the CISA official told reporters.
However, “at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage. But we are aware of the incident and the global scope of it.”
Martin Matishak
is the senior cybersecurity reporter for The Record. Prior to joining Recorded Future News in 2021, he spent more than five years at Politico, where he covered digital and national security developments across Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. He previously was a reporter at The Hill, National Journal Group and Inside Washington Publishers.