CISA, FBI issue election public service announcement on phishing threats ahead of midterms

“Malicious cyber actors may attempt to disrupt the 2026 U.S. midterm elections using phishing and smishing techniques to steal user data, including login credentials and sensitive information,” the joint PSA says. The FBI published the PSA on Oct. 16 with CISA.

The alert demonstrates CISA’s renewed efforts to work on election security, following a rollback in 2025 under the second Trump administration. CISA put out a new election infrastructure security plan on Sept. 24 providing an overview of the current threat landscape, which signals the agency’s priorities on securing voting registration databases and mitigating insider threats.

The plan also includes a list of CISA's no-cost cybersecurity services available to election officials. The rollout of the plan has been met with skepticism from stakeholders who raised concerns over the breakdown of relationships between state election officials and CISA’s level of election security support in 2025 and 2026. The PSA centers around phishing and “smishing” threats, a form of phishing “that aims to deceive and defraud people through text messages.” The Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center identified phishing the most common initial access vector for threat actors looking to target election infrastructure, in a recent interview with Inside Cybersecurity.

“The FBI and CISA urge election officials and the American public to critically evaluate the sources of their emails and mobile messages,” the PSA says. “Such precautions are critical to remaining vigilant for phishing and smishing attempts that try to manipulate the recipient into disclosing sensitive information, such as login credentials or financial information, or that install malware on their devices.” “During the last two election cycles, election officials experienced a surge of phishing attempts and within the last year, the FBI saw an increase of smishing attempts through encrypted chat applications,” according to the PSA. “In recent years, these actors have crafted increasingly sophisticated phishing and smishing campaigns that closely resemble legitimate communications, making it difficult for targets to distinguish fraudulent messages,” the PSA says.

CISA and the FBI highlight the rise of artificial intelligence capabilities as “an evolutionary step by allowing malicious cyber actors to carry out sophisticated operations quicker and at a greater scale.” President Trump signed a Sept. 29 executive order changing the government’s terminology for AI to “super intelligence.” “Malicious cyber actors now use SI tools to facilitate a continuous learning process that improves the effectiveness of automated email messages in phishing attempts,” the PSA says. CISA and the FBI are urging election officials to implement phishing-resistant multifactor authentication and to examine suspicious content for AI watermarking.