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The county’s April 26, 2024 press release states that the cyberattack was undertaken by “unknown malicious actors.” Fortunately, this time, the cybersecurity incident is being investigated by federal authorities, although it is unclear how many federal agencies are involved. The county also stated that it learned of the attack from DHS and CISA, and also clai that the County has informed “federal authorities,” suggesting that additional federal agencies have been involved in addition to DHS and CISA.
At the moment, there are many more questions than answers. But citizens are formally asking questions of the Coffee Election Board and have requested answers be delivered at Tuesday morning’s meeting of the Board. See the letter here. Please join other Coffee County citizens at Tuesday’s 9:30 am Election Board meeting and join them to insist on candid answers.
It is our understanding that Coffee County officials were not forthcoming with state officials about the cyberattack, reportedly denying the attack for days, although federal authorities were aware of the attack. Citizens deserve to know why Coffee officials would not have alerted state officials immediately at the first sign of a cyberattack. This is a very serious question that requires an honest answer from the officials.
If delayed notification of the state occurred, county decision-makers should be held to account. Everyone understands that minutes matter in a cyberattack so that attack software and target records can be isolated. Delaying reporting is unacceptable and absolutely confounding in anyone’s book.
So we find ourselves again in Coffee County asking “what did they know and when did they know it?” For a refresher on the first three breaches, see Lawfare’s reporting of the events, in Anna Bower’s “What the Heck Happened in Coffee County, Georgia?”
If past is prologue, on Tuesday, we expect Board and staff routine tired responses of:
— "we’ve not been told of a breach” (video clip)
—“we're hearing about it now for the first time.” (video clip)
— “that’s attorney-client privileged.”
—“we will take that up in a future meeting.”
—“we don’t take questions from the public.” (video clip)
Don’t be naïve and satisfied with superficial false responses such as, “the voting system is not connected to the Internet.” That’s simply not true. It is unclear if any unauthorized changes were made to election-related records in the attack, but considerable effort should be taken to investigate the facts and remediate any altered records.
Please attend the meeting Tuesday, to help extract overdue answers from the election officials.
CCG is funding the video recordings of the monthly meetings and will post video of the Tuesday meeting. Each meeting cost $200 to record and publish. Please help us fund these efforts for local government transparency, making it possible for Coffee citizens to see what their government is doing.
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