Georgia election official says battleground state fended off cyberattack likely from a foreign country

(CNN) — Georgia’s secretary of state’s office this month fended off a cyberattack believed to have come from a foreign country against the website voters use to request absentee ballots, the office told CNN.The state’s cyber defenses — aided by tech firm Cloudflare — repelled the hackers’ attempts to knock the absentee ballot website offline, and there was no disruption to voters’ ability to request ballots.“It slowed our systems down for a little bit, but it never stopped our systems from working,” Gabe Sterling, an official in Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections in the battleground state, told CNN.The cyberattack likely originated from overseas and had “the hallmarks of a foreign power or a foreign entity [acting] at the behest of a foreign power,” Sterling said.US officials have yet to publicly confirm that assessment.Hundreds of thousands of IP addresses from numerous countries flooded the Georgia website with bogus traffic, Sterling said in an interview on Wednesday.“From talking to experts, it felt like a probing attack, saying, ‘Hey, if we do this, what will they do in response?’” Sterling said.CNN has requested comment from Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based firm that protects large portions of the internet from cyberattacks.The FBI...