The top American cybersecurity agency said on Tuesday it saw no credible threats aimed at disrupting the voting infrastructure. “At this time, we've seen no evidence of malicious activity impacting the security or integrity of election infrastructure,” Jen Easterly, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said during the organization’s fourth and final Election Day media call. "While at the national level we saw some minor disruptive activity throughout the day, activity that was largely expected and planned for.” Election security has been a top concern about the presidential contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump ever since Trump began making baseless claims that he was cheated during the 2020 race for the White House. He made similar claims of widespread fraud in the swing states of Michigian and Pennsylvania earlier on Tuesday. At the time, Cait Conley, CISA’s senior advisor for elections, said there was no evidence to support them — an assertion Easterly later reinforced. "We have no data or evidence that points to any sort of mass cheating,” she said. The greatest disruption to voting proved to be a series of bogus bomb threats made in several swing states, including nearly 40 in Georgia, according to federal and local officials. The FBI “is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the agency said in a statement. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontesalso (D) blamed Russia for the hoaxes. But Easterly urged caution, as the federal government had not formally made an attribution over the activity. “As the FBI said in their statement, it looks like these threats came from dot-ru domains. I don't necessarily think that that means they were Russian. I think that is still being investigated,” she told reporters. “I don't think it's been established that the bomb-threat hoax was necessarily attributed to Russia.” The FBI itself was a target of disinformation. The law enforcement agency issued a pair of statements during the day that debunked multiple instances where its name and insignia were misused to promote “false narratives” about the election. Easterly said she expects to make a statement about the resiliency of the country’s voting infrastructure. ”There is still work to be done to come to a certified result,” she said. “I don't want to count out that our foreign adversaries may still be active in their aims of influence operations to undermine American confidence in the legitimacy of the results."
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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.