FEC filing system hacked ahead of midterms

A hacker or hackers targeted the US Federal Election Commission’s website, disrupting the agency’s electronic filings system a week before the November 3 elections, according to an email seen by Reuters. The FEC confirmed that its electronic filing system is currently offline and that its IT staff are actively working to restore service. While users can still search the website for past reports, the FEC declined to provide further comment on the outage. This comes a week before the midterm elections, which will determine whether President Donald Trump’s Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress for the next two years. The FEC does not play a role in administering US elections, and the outage should have no effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots. However, the outage prevents organizations from filing the FEC’s 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, which show how much political groups and others are spending on specific races. The FEC’s filing system has been down since around 10 p.m. ET on Monday (0200 GMT Tuesday), according to a status message posted by the agency. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

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