Federal Election Commission campaign finance disruption demonstrates heightened cyber threat landscape

“While the FEC has no role in voting machines, voter registration, and vote tallies, it plays a critical role in providing transparency into political and campaign spending,” Geoff Hale, visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Inside Cybersecurity. Hale worked at the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for nearly a decade, playing a key role in developing relationships with election officials. The FEC took their election filing systems offline on Oct.

27 to address an attempted intrusion from a “bad actor,” according to an email sent to political finance consulting firms first reported by Reuters. The FEC is an independent regulatory agency in charge of overseeing federal campaign finance laws and is not involved in voter registration. FEC deputy press secretary Myles Martin said in a statement, “At this time, we can point to the status update posted to the FEC’s website that the electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service.” Martin confirmed that the “website search for FEC reports is not affected” by the ongoing outage and said FEC is “currently investigating this issue.” The attempted FEC attack represents a shift in how threat actors are targeting election-related infrastructure from a focus on influence operations towards larger disruptions.

Threat intelligence firm Aletha identified a Russia-backed online campaign targeted at influence the midterm elections in an Oct. 16 report, while cyber firm Check Point highlighted “deepfake” videos depicting celebrities endorsing political causes in an Oct. 14 report.

“The FEC’s electronic filing system is key infrastructure to enabling the transparency that voters, journalists, and the public rely on,” CDT’s Hale said. The ongoing FEC outage will prevent candidate committees from reporting contributions within a 48-hour notice as required by law. The Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions also highlighted the heightened cybersecurity landscape in the context of the FEC disruption as Election Day approaches.

Noah Praetz, president of Ready for Tuesday, said he is “concerned about our geopolitical environment” during a Oct. 28 media briefing held by the partnership, emphasizing that cybersecurity threats “remain quite an issue” leading up to Election Day. The Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions represents election professionals that serve jurisdictions serving over 250,000 voters.

Ready for Tuesday works directly with election offices to provide support and guidance for election preparation. “As good as election officials have gotten [at cybersecurity], the strongest cybersecurity protections we had in elections was the federal government drawing a red line and defending forward, with CISA being in everyone’s corner on the election side,” Praetz said. Praetz administered elections in Cook County, IL for nearly two decades before founding Ready for Tuesday in 2026.

Praetz said “It’s a very different risk environment now for countries like Iran, China, Russia and North Korea. They have stayed back on making any effect on election infrastructure security because of the risk calculus, so it is a thing that we have to keep an eye on and continue to invest in.” CISA published an election infrastructure security plan on Sept. 24 providing overview of the threat landscape and a list of the agency’s no-cost cybersecurity services for election officials.

The plan signaled a major shift at the agency under the second Trump administration, which rolled back CISA’s election security work in 2025, but relationships with state and local officials have been strained in the lead up to Election Day due to the CISA cuts. Paulina Gutierrez, election commission executive director in Milwaukee, WI reflected on the relationship with CISA in the briefing with reporters. Gutierrez said her jurisdiction “does not have the same relationship” with CISA compared to the 2024 election cycle.

“We do miss our CISA folks, but I still have regular conversations with our former CISA security experts,” Gutierrez said. “In our City of Milwaukee local government, it’s all hands on deck.