Through Cloudflare’s Impact programs, we provide cyber security products to help protect access to authoritative voting information and the security of sensitive voter data. Two core programs in this space are the Athenian Project, dedicated to protecting state and local governments that run elections, and Cloudflare for Campaigns, a project with a suite of Cloudflare products to secure political campaigns’ and state parties’ websites and internal teams.
However, the weeks ahead of the elections, and Election Day itself, were not entirely devoid of attacks. Using data from Cloudflare Radar, which showcases global Internet traffic, attack, and technology trends and insights, we can explore traffic patterns, attack types, and top attack sources associated with both Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns participants.
For both programs, overall traffic volume unsurprisingly ramped up as Election Day approached. SQL Injection (SQLi) and HTTP Anomaly attacks were the two largest categories of attacks mitigated by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), and the United States was the largest source of observed attacks — see more on this last point below.
Below, we explore the trends seen across both customer sets from October 1, 2022, through Election Day on November 8.
Athenian Project
Throughout October, daily peak traffic volumes effectively doubled over the course of the month, with a weekday/weekend pattern also clearly visible. However, significant traffic growth is visible on Monday, November 7, and Tuesday, November 8 (Election Day), with Monday’s peak just under 2x October’s peaks, while Tuesday saw two peaks, one just under 4x higher than October peaks, while the other was just over 4x higher. Zooming in, the first peak was at 1300 UTC (0800 Eastern time, 0500 Pacific time), while the second was at 0400 UTC (2300 Eastern time, 2000 Pacific time). The first one appears to be aligned with the polls opening on the East Coast, while the second appears to be aligned with the time that the polls closed on the West Coast.
However, aggregating the traffic here presents a somewhat misleading picture. While both spikes were due to increased traffic across multiple customer sites, the second one was exacerbated by a massive increase in traffic for a single customer. Regardless, the increased traffic clearly shows that voters turned to local government sites around Election Day.
Despite this increase in overall traffic, attack traffic mitigated by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) remained remarkably consistent throughout October and into November, as seen in the graph below. The obvious exception was an attack that occurred on Monday, October 10. This attack targeted a single Athenian Project participant, and was mitigated by rate limiting the requests.
SQL injection (SQLi) attacks saw significant growth in volume in the week and a half ahead of Election Day, along with an earlier significant spike on October 24. While the last weekend in October (October 29 and 30) saw significant SQLi attack activity, the weekend of November 5 and 6 was comparatively quiet. However, those attacks ramped up again heading into and on Election Day, as seen in the graph below.
Attempted attacks mitigated with the HTTP Anomaly ruleset also ramped up in the week ahead of Election Day, though to a much lesser extent than SQLi attacks. As the graph below shows, the biggest spikes were seen on October 31/November 1, and just after midnight UTC on November 4 (late afternoon to early evening in the US). Related request volume also grew heading into Election Day, but without significant short-duration spikes. There is also a brief but significant attack clearly visible on the graph on October 10. However, it occurred several hours after the rate limited attack referenced above — it is not clear if the two are related.
The distribution of attacks over the surveyed period from October 1 through November 9 shows that those categorized as SQLi and HTTP Anomaly were responsible for just over two-thirds of WAF-mitigated requests. Nearly 14% were categorized as “Software Specific,” which includes attacks related to specific CVEs. The balance of the attacks were mitigated by WAF rules in categories including File Inclusion, XSS (Cross Site Scripting), Directory Traversal, and Command Injection.
Media reports suggest that foreign adversaries actively try to interfere with elections in the United States. While this may be the case, analysis of the mitigated attacks targeting Athenian Project customers found that over 95% of the mitigated requests (attacks) came from IP addresses that geolocate to the United States. However, that does not mean that the attackers themselves are necessarily located in the country, but rather that they appear to be using compromised systems and proxies within the United States to launch their attacks against these sites protected by Cloudflare.
Cloudflare for Campaigns
In contrast to Athenian Project participants, traffic to candidate sites that are participants in Cloudflare for Campaigns began to grow several weeks ahead of Election Day. The graph below shows a noticeable increase (~50%) in peak traffic volumes starting on October 12, with an additional growth (50-100%) starting a week later. Traffic to these sites appeared to quiet a bit toward the end of October, but saw significant growth again heading into, and during, Election Day.
However, once again, this aggregate traffic data presents something of a misleading picture, as one candidate site saw multiple times more traffic than the other participating sites. While those other sites saw similar shifts in traffic as well, they were dwarfed by those experienced by the outlier site.
The WAF-mitigated traffic trend for campaign sites followed a similar pattern to the overall traffic. As the graph below shows, attack traffic also began to increase around October 19, with a further ramp near the end of the month. The October 27 spike visible in the graph was due to an attack targeting a single customer’s site, and was addressed using “Security Level” mitigation techniques, which uses IP reputation information to decide if and how to present challenges for incoming requests.
The top two rule categories, HTTP Anomaly and SQLi, together accounted for nearly three-quarters of the mitigated requests, and Directory Traversal attacks were just under 10% of mitigated requests for this customer set. The HTTP Anomaly and Directory Traversal percentages were higher than those for attacks targeting Athenian Project participants, while the SQLi percentage was slightly lower.
Once again, a majority of the WAF-mitigated attacks came from IP addresses in the United States. However, among Cloudflare for Campaigns participants, the United States only accounted for 55% of attacks, significantly lower than the 95% seen for Athenian Project participants. The balance is spread across a long tail of countries, with allies including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom among the top five. As noted above, however, the attackers may be elsewhere, and are using botnets or other compromised systems in these countries to launch attacks.
Improving security with data
We are proud to be trusted by local governments, campaigns, state parties, and voting rights organizations to protect their websites and provide uninterrupted access to information and trusted election results. Sharing information about the threats facing these websites helps us further support their valuable work by enabling them, and other participants in the election space, to take proactive steps to improve site security.
On Tuesday, November 8, 2022, constituents cast their ballots for the 2022 US midterm elections, which included races for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate, and many gubernatorial races in states including Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Preparing for elections is a giant task, and states and localities have their work cut out for them with corralling poll workers, setting up polling places, and managing the physical security of ballots and voting machines.
We at Cloudflare are proud to be able to play a role in helping safeguard the integrity of the electoral process. Through our Impact programs, we provide cyber security products to help protect access to authoritative voting information and the security of sensitive voter data.
We have reported on our work in the election space with the Athenian Project, dedicated to protecting state and local governments that run elections; Cloudflare for Campaigns, a project with a suite of Cloudflare products to secure political campaigns’ and state parties’ websites and internal teams; and Project Galileo, in which we have helped voting rights organizations and election results sites stay online during traffic spikes.
Since our reporting in 2020, we have expanded our relationships withgovernment agencies and worked with project participants across the United States in a range of election roles to support free and fair elections. For the midterm elections, we continued to support election entities with the tools and expertise on how to secure their web infrastructure to promote trust in the voting process.
Overall, we were ready for the unexpected, as we had experience supporting those in the election community in 2020 during a time of uncertainty around COVID-19 and increased political polarization. But for the midterms, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the key agency tasked with protecting election infrastructure against cyber threats, reported the morning of November 8 that they “continue to see no specific or credible threat to disrupt election infrastructure” for the day of the election.
At Cloudflare, although we did see reports of a few smaller attacks and outages, we are pleased that the robust cyber security preparations by governments, nonprofits, local municipalities, campaigns, and state parties appeared to be successful, as we did not identify large-scale attacks on November 8, 2022.
Below are highlights on the activity we saw as we approached midterms and how we worked together with all of these groups to secure election resources.
Key takeaways from the 2022 midterm elections
For state and local governments protected under the Athenian Project
For political campaigns and state parties protected under Cloudflare for Campaigns
With our partnership with Defending Digital Campaigns, we protected 56 House campaigns, 15 political parties, and 34 Senate campaigns during the midterm elections.
Average daily application-layer attack volume against campaign sites was over 3x higher in November through Election Day than it was in October.
From October 1 through November 8, 2022, political campaign and state party sites saw an average of 149,949 threats per day.
Risks to online election groups as we approached the midterms
In preparation for the midterms, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CISA put out a variety of public service announcements calling attention to cyber election risks, like DDoS attacks, and providing reassurance that cyber attacks were “unlikely to result in large-scale disruptions or prevent voting.” Earlier this year, the FBI issued a warning on phishing attempts, with details about a seemingly organized plot to steal election officials’ credentials via an email with a fake invoice attached.
We also saw some threat actors announce plans to target the midterm elections. Killnet, a pro-Russia hacking group, targeted US state websites, successfully taking the public-facing websites of a number of states temporarily offline. Hacking groups will target public-facing government websites to promote mistrust in the democratic process.
Voting authorities face challenges unrelated to malicious activity, too. Without the proper tools in place, traffic spikes during election season can impede voters’ ability to access information about polling places, registration, and results. During the 2020 US election, we saw 4x traffic spikes to government elections sites.
On the political organizing side, political campaigns and state parties increasingly rely on the Internet and their web presence to issue policy stances, raise donations, and organize their campaign operations. In October 2022, the FBI notified Republican and Democratic state parties that Chinese hackers were scanning party websites for vulnerabilities.
So, what happened during the 2022 US midterm elections?
As we prepared for the midterms, we had a team of engineers ready to assist state and local governments, campaigns, political parties, and voting rights organizations looking for help to protect their websites from cyber attacks. A majority of the threats that we saw and directly assisted on were before the election, especially in the wake of many advisories from federal agencies on Killnet’s targeting of US government sites.
During this time, we worked with CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to provide security briefings to state and local election officials and to make sure our free Enterprise services for state and local governments under the Athenian Project were part of JCDC’s Cybersecurity Toolkit to Protect Elections. We provided additional support in terms of webinars, security recommendations, and best practices to better prepare these groups for the midterms.
A week before the election, we worked with partners such as Defending Digital Campaigns to onboard many political campaigns and state parties to Cloudflare for Campaigns after seeing a number of campaigns come under DDoS attack. With this, we were able to accept 21 of the Senate Campaigns up for re-election, with an overall total of 34 Senate campaigns protected under the project.
Preparing for the next election
Being in the election space means working with local government, campaigns, state parties, and voting rights organizations to build trust. Democracies rely on access to information and trusted election results.
We accept applications to the Athenian Project all year long, not just during election season — learn how to apply. We look forward to providing more information on threats to these actors in the election space in the next few months to support their valuable work.
Brasil, sei lá Ou o meu coração se engana Ou uma terra igual não há — From Tom Jobim’s song, Brasil Nativo
Brazil’s recent presidential election got significant attention from both global and national media outlets, not only because of the size of the country, but also because of premature allegations of electoral fraud. The first round of the Brazilian 2022 general election was held on October 2, and the runoff was held on Sunday, October 30. With 124 million votes counted, former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) won with 50.9% of the votes, beating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who had 49.1% of the votes.
The final results of the elections as published by the official Tribunal Super Eleitoral, with more than 124 million votes counted.)
Using Cloudflare’s data, we can explore the impact that this election had on Internet traffic patterns in Brazil, as well as interest in content from election-related websites, news organizations, social media platforms, and video platforms.
Here are a few highlights: while the runoff generated much more interest to election related websites (we actually have a view to DNS queries, a proxy to websites), the first round showed bigger increases in traffic to news organizations.
For the candidate’s domains, Lula’s win had the higher impact.
Also: official results came earlier on the runoff than the first round, and spikes in traffic were higher earlier that day (October 30).
(Note: we’re using local times — that means UTC-3, that is related to the more populated regions of Brazil — in this blog, although some charts have x-axis UTC).
Let’s start by looking at general Internet traffic in Brazil.
On election days, traffic goes down (during the day)
Using Cloudflare Radar, we can see something that has also been observed in other countries that hold Sunday elections: when most people are getting outside to vote, Internet traffic goes down (in comparison with previous Sundays). We saw this in the two rounds of the Presidential elections in France back in April 2022, in Portugal’s legislative elections in January 2022 and now, in Brazil.
We can also compare Sundays in October. There were five weekends. The two that had elections show the same pattern of lower traffic during the day, as seen in the previous chart. Comparing the two election days, there was a bigger drop in traffic on October 30 (down 21% at around 18:00 local time), than on October 2 (down 10% at around 20:00). Related or not, there was a bigger turnout on the runoff (124 million votes) than on the first round (123 million). Here’s the view on October 30:
And here’s October 2:
A more clear view in comparing the October weekends, and where you can see how the October 2 and 30 Sundays have the same pattern and different from the others three of the month, is this one (bear in mind that the x-axis is showing UTC time, it’s -3 hours in Brazil):
If we look at the main network providers (ASNs) in Brazil, the trend is the same. Claro (AS28573) also shows the drop in traffic on October 30, as does Telefonica (AS27699):
Here’s Telefonica:
We observed a similar impact from the October 30 runoff election to traffic from different states in Brazil, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Norte, Minas Gerais, and Bahia.
Mobile device usage greater on weekends (and on election days)
When we look at the share of Brazil’s Internet traffic from mobile devices during October, we find that the highest percentages were on October 2 (first round of the elections, 66.3%), October 9 (66.4%) and October 30 (runoff election, 65%). We’ve seen this in other elections, an increase in mobile device traffice, so this seems to follow the same trend.
This chart also shows how mobile device usage in Brazil is at its highest on the weekends (all the main spikes for percentage of mobile devices are over the weekend, and more on Sundays).
Now, let’s look at anonymized and aggregated DNS traffic data from our 1.1.1.1 resolver. This data provides a proxy for traffic to, and thus interest in, different categories of sites from users in Brazil around the election.
Election-related sites: higher interest in the runoff
Brazil has government websites related to elections, but also its own Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (Electoral Superior Court) that includes a website and app with live updates on the results of the elections for everyone to check. Looking at those related domains and using mean hourly traffic in September as a baseline, we can see that the October 2 first round spiked to 16x more DNS queries at 20:00 local time. However, DNS query traffic during the runoff election peaked at 18:00 local time on October 30 with 17.4x more DNS traffic as compared to the September baseline.
We can look more closely at each one of those two election days. On October 2, traffic had its first significant increase at around 17:00 local time, reaching 15x more requests to election-related domains as compared to the September baseline. This initial peak occurred at the same time the polling stations were closing. However, the peak that day, at 16x above baseline, was reached at 20:00 local time, as seen in the figure below.
On Sunday, October 30, 2022, the pattern is similar, although the peak was reached earlier, given that results started to arrive earlier than on the first round. The peak was reached at around 18:00 local time, with request traffic 17.4x above baseline.
As seen in the figure below, Lula first led in the official results at 18:45 local time, with votes from 67% of the polling stations counted at that time. Around 20:00 Lula was considered the winner (the peak seen in the previous chart was at that time).
Candidate websites: in the end, winner takes all?
For Lula-related domains, there are clear spikes around the first round of elections on October 2. A 13x spike was observed on October 1 at around 21:00 local time. Two notable spikes were observed on October 2 — one at 16.7x above baseline at 09:00 local time, and the other at 10.7x above baseline at 21:00 local time. During the October 30 runoff election, only one clear spike was observed. The spike, at 16.7x above baseline, occurred at around 20:00, coincident with the time Lula was being announced as the winner.
For Bolsonaro-related domains, we observed a different pattern. Increased traffic as compared to the baseline is visible in the days leading up to the first round election, reaching 10x on September 30. On October 2, a 8x spike above baseline was seen at 18:00 local time. However, the two most significant spikes seen over the course of the month were observed on October 16, at 20x above baseline, a few hours after the first Lula-Bolsonaro television debate, and on October 25, at around 20:00, at 22x above baseline. That was the last week of campaigning before the October 30 runoff and when several polling predictions were announced. The second and last Bolsonaro-Lula debate was on October 28, and there’s a spike at 22:00 to Lula’s websites, and a smaller but also clear one at 21:00 to Bolsonaro’s websites).
News websites: more interest in the first round
With official election results being available more rapidly, DNS traffic for Brazilian news organization websites peaked much earlier in the evening than what we saw in France, for example, where more definitive election results arrived much later on election day. But another interesting trend here is how the first round, on October 2, had 9.1x more DNS traffic (compared with the September baseline), than what we saw during the runoff on October 30 (6.1x).
The way the results arrived faster also had an impact on the time of the peak, occurring at around 19:00 local time on October 30, as compared to around 20:00 on October 2.
At 19:45 local time on October 30, Lula was already the winner with more than 98% of the votes counted. After 20:00 there was a clear drop in DNS traffic to news organizations.
On October 2, it was only around 22:00 that it became official that there would be a runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro. Peak request volume was reached at 20:00 (9x), but traffic remained high (8x) at around 21:00 and until 22:00, like the following chart shows:
Conclusion: Real world events impact the Internet
Cloudflare Radar, our tool for Internet insights, can provide a unique perspective on how major global or national events impact the Internet. It is interesting to not only see that a real world event can impact Internet traffic (and different types of websites) for a whole country, but also see how much that impact is represented at specific times. It’s all about human behavior at relevant moments in time, like elections as a collective event is.
We blogged previously about some trends concerning the first round of the 2022 French presidential election, held on April 10. Here we take a look at the run-off election this Sunday, April 24, that ended up re-electing Emmanuel Macron as President of France.
First, the two main trends: French-language news sites outside France were clearly impacted by the local rule that states that exit polls can only be published after 20:00.
And Internet traffic was similar on both the election days (April 10 and 24) and that includes the increase in use of mobile devices and interest in news websites — there we also saw a clear interest in the Macron-Le Pen debate on April 20.
We have discussed before that election days usually don’t have a major impact on overall Internet traffic. Let’s compare April 10 with 24, the two Sundays when the elections were held. The trends throughout the day are incredibly similar (with a slight increase in traffic on April 24), even with a two-week gap between them.
Another election-day trend is the use of mobile devices to access the Internet, mainly at night. The largest spikes in number of requests made using mobile devices in France during April seemed to be all election-related:
#1. April 10 (first round of the election), 21:00 local time. 58% of traffic by mobile devices.
#2. April 24 (second round of the election), 22:00. 57% mobile traffic.
#3. April 20 (presidential debate), 22:00. 56% mobile traffic.
Not only did both the election Sundays (after the polling stations were closed) have an impact on mobile traffic in France, but the presidential debate (Wednesday, April 20) had the same type of impact, increasing requests from mobile devices.
The TV debate was seen by 15.6 million viewers in France and lasted between 21:00 and 22:45, local time; at the same time mobile traffic was higher than in any other Wednesday and was the #3 spike of April, with 10% more mobile requests than in the previous Wednesday at the same time.
The special case of French-language news sites
For the elections, local rules state that French media is barred from publishing partial results or polls of any kind until 20:00, the time when voting stations in metropolitan France officially close. So, that means that French news outlets have to wait for the allotted hour to give official projections.
Given that, we looked at French-language news websites from French-speaking countries like Switzerland and Belgium. They aren’t bound by French law and can show information about exit polls earlier (bear in mind that in most French cities polling stations close at 19:00 and only in the bigger cities does it go on until 20:00).
We can clearly see that requests to French-language news sites outside France clearly spiked earlier than those in France. News websites in France had spikes after 20:00 local time on both elections days, but Belgian and Swiss news sites had major increases in traffic at 19:00 on April 10 (1857% more than the previous Sunday!). For the runoff elections on April 24, the biggest spike of the month was at 18:00 (3100% more requests than the previous Sunday), but it was also higher than on previous days one hour later, at 19:00 (3080% higher).
There are no spikes at all related to the French debate (April 20), so that seems to show that those Belgian and Swiss news sites had a huge increase of French citizens eager to see the polls before 20:00.
Election results change online patterns
We saw two weeks ago that official election websites had a clear spike in requests on April 10, the first round of the elections. Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties.
Official French election-related websites had an increase in traffic throughout the week prior to the first round, after Monday, April 4, but it’s no surprise that the two major spikes were on both the elections’ day. How much? Here is the breakdown by bigger spikes in traffic:
#1. April 10 (first round of the election), 00:00 local time. 925% more requests than the previous Sunday (at the same time).
#2. April 24 (second round of the election), 20:00. 707% more requests.
#3. April 10 (first round of the election), 20:00. 370% more requests.
#3. April 11, 10:00. 115% more requests than the previous Monday.
(there’s a draw at these last two spikes)
News sites go up after polling stations close
Regarding the main French news websites, as we saw two weeks ago, 20:00 local time, after the polling stations are all closed, and the first major polls are revealed continues to be the time of the biggest spikes of the whole month.
The biggest spike of the month in our aggregate DNS chart, that shows trends from 12 news websites, was definitely on April 10, the first round election day, around 20:00 local time, when those domains had 116% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Sunday. And the second-biggest spike was the runoff election day, on April 24, at the same time (20:00 local time), with an increase of 142% in traffic compared to the previous Sunday at the same time.
Very close to those two spikes is Monday morning, April 11, after the first round of the elections. At 10:00 local time requests were 45% higher than in the previous Monday. The Macron-Le Pen debate on Wednesday, April 20, also had a spike. At 21:00, when it was starting, requests were 56% higher than on the previous Wednesday.
The same trend is seen on the major French TV station websites, with a clear isolated spike on April 10 (the first round election day) at 20:00 local time, with a 472% increase in traffic compared to the previous Sunday, when the main exit polls were announced. Something similar, at the same time (20:00), on April 24, with a 375% increase in requests compared to the previous Sunday.
That’s only matched, again, by the April 20 debate. At 21:00 traffic was 308% higher than the previous Wednesday, so people were clearly taking notice of the debate and checking news outlets and TV station websites — there were French sites like france.tv that transmitted via streaming.
Conclusion
When people are really eager to see something as important as election results, they go and search where the first polls are (in this case, before 20:00 local time, they are outside France).
Also, in two different election moments in France separated by two weeks, there are clear similarities in Internet trends that show the way people use the Internet during election periods. That’s more clear when results start to arrive, but also a debate as important for a presidential election as the Le Pen-Macron one, also impacts not only the Internet traffic but also the attention to news and TV websites.
Nous avons publié un article de blog consacré à certaines tendances concernant le premier tour de l’élection présidentielle française de 2022, qui s’est déroulé le 10 avril. Nous nous intéressons ici au second tour de l’élection, qui a eu lieu le dimanche 24 avril et a abouti à la réélection d’Emmanuel Macron à la présidence de la France.
Tout d’abord, les deux principales tendances : les sites d’information francophones situés hors de France ont été clairement impactés par la réglementation locale, qui stipule que les estimations ne peuvent être publiées qu’après 20 heures.
Le trafic Internet a été similaire les deux jours de l’élection (les 10 et 24 avril), et cela inclut l’augmentation de l’utilisation des appareils mobiles et l’intérêt pour les sites d’actualités – – là aussi, nous avons constaté un net intérêt pour le débat Macron-Le Pen du 20 avril.
Nous avons déjà évoqué le fait que les jours d’élections n’ont généralement pas un impact majeur sur le trafic Internet global. Comparons les journées des 10 et 24 avril, les deux dimanches où ont eu lieu les élections. Les tendances tout au long de la journée sont incroyablement similaires (avec une légère augmentation du trafic le 24 avril), même à deux semaines d’intervalle.
Une autre tendance des jours d’élection est l’utilisation d’appareils mobiles pour accéder à l’internet, principalement la nuit. Les plus importants pics du nombre de requêtes transmises depuis des appareils mobiles en France au mois d’avril semblent être tous liés aux élections :
N°1. 10 avril (premier tour de l’élection), 21 heures, heure locale. 58 % du trafic provenait d’appareils mobiles.
N°2. 24 avril (deuxième tour de l’élection), 22 heures. 57 % de trafic mobile.
N°3. 20 avril (débat présidentiel), 22 heures. 56 % de trafic mobile.
Les deux dimanches de l’élection (après la fermeture des bureaux de vote) ont eu un impact sur le trafic mobile en France, et le débat présidentiel (mercredi 20 avril) a eu un impact semblable, entraînant une augmentation des requêtes provenant d’appareils mobiles.
Le débat télévisé a été regardé par 15,6 millions de téléspectateurs en France et a été diffusé de 21 heures à 22h45, heure locale ; au même moment, le trafic mobile a été plus élevé que tout autre mercredi et a constitué le pic n°3 du mois d’avril, avec une augmentation de 10 % des requêtes mobiles par rapport au mercredi précédent à la même heure.
Le cas particulier des sites d’actualités en langue française
Pour les élections, la réglementation locale stipule que les médias français ne peuvent pas publier de résultats partiels ou de sondages de quelque nature que ce soit avant 20 heures, heure de fermeture officielle des bureaux de vote en France métropolitaine. Cela signifie donc que les médias français doivent attendre l’heure prévue pour annoncer les estimations officielles.
Nous avons donc consulté les sites web d’actualités en langue française de pays francophones tels que la Suisse et la Belgique. Ces sites ne sont pas liés par la loi française et peuvent diffuser plus tôt des informations concernant les estimations (n’oubliez pas que dans la plupart des villes françaises, les bureaux de vote ferment à 19 heures, et qu’ils ne restent ouverts jusqu’à 20 heures que dans les grandes villes).
Nous voyons clairement que les requêtes transmises aux sites d’actualités francophones situés hors de France ont connu un pic plus tôt dans la journée que celles transmises aux sites situés en France. Les sites d’actualités situés en France ont connu des pics après 20 heures, heure locale, lors des deux jours des élections, mais les sites d’information belges et suisses ont connu des hausses de trafic importantes à 19 heures le 10 avril (1857 % de plus que le dimanche précédent !). Pour le second tour des élections le 24 avril, le pic le plus important du mois a été enregistré à 18 heures (3100 % de requêtes en plus par rapport au dimanche précédent), mais il était également plus élevé que les jours précédents une heure plus tard, à 19 heures (3080 % de plus).
Aucun pic n’est lié au débat français (20 avril), ce qui semble indiquer que les sites d’actualités belges et suisses ont connu une forte augmentation de la fréquentation due au nombre de citoyens français désireux de consulter les sondages avant 20 heures.
Les résultats des élections modifient les modèles en ligne
Nous avons constaté, il y a deux semaines, que les sites web officiels des élections ont connu un pic de requêtes clairement visible le 10 avril, date du premier tour des élections. Nous examinons ici les tendances des requêtes DNS pour évaluer le trafic circulant vers les propriétés Internet.
Les sites officiels français dédiés aux élections ont connu une augmentation du trafic tout au long de la semaine précédant le premier tour, après le lundi 4 avril, mais c’est sans surprise que les deux pics majeurs ont été observés le jour des élections. Quel volume ? Voici la répartition en fonction des plus grands pics de trafic :
N°1. 10 avril (premier tour de l’élection), minuit, heure locale. 925 % de requêtes en plus par rapport au dimanche précédent (à la même heure).
N°2. 24 avril (deuxième tour de l’élection), 20 heures. 707 % de requêtes en plus.
N°3. 10 avril (premier tour de l’élection), 20 heures. 370 % de requêtes en plus.
N°3. 11 avril 10 heures. 115 % de requêtes en plus par rapport au lundi précédent.
(Ces deux derniers pics sont égaux)
La fréquentation des sites d’actualités augmente après la fermeture des bureaux de vote
En ce qui concerne les principaux sites d’actualités français, comme nous l’avons vu il y a deux semaines, c’est à 20 heures, heure locale, après la fermeture de tous les bureaux de vote et la révélation des premiers grands sondages que les plus importants pics mensuels continuent d’être observés.
Le plus important pic du mois sur notre graphique DNS agrégé, qui présente les tendances de 12 sites d’actualités, a sans conteste été observé le 10 avril, jour du premier tour des élections, vers 20 heures, heure locale, lorsque ces domaines ont enregistré un trafic 116 % supérieur au dimanche précédent à la même heure. Le deuxième pic le plus important a été enregistré le jour du second tour des élections, le 24 avril, à la même heure (20 heures, heure locale), avec une augmentation de 142 % du trafic par rapport au dimanche précédent à la même heure.
Très proche de ces deux pics se trouve le lundi matin du 11 avril, après le premier tour des élections. À 10 heures, heure locale, le nombre de requêtes était supérieur de 45 % à celui enregistré le lundi précédent. Le débat Macron-Le Pen, le mercredi 20 avril, a également provoqué un pic. À 21 heures, heure de début du débat, le nombre de requêtes était 56 % plus élevé que le mercredi précédent.
On observe la même tendance sur les sites des grandes chaînes de télévision françaises, avec un pic clair et isolé à 20 h, heure locale, le 10 avril (jour du premier tour des élections) et une augmentation de 472 % du trafic par rapport au dimanche précédent, lors de l’annonce des principales estimations. Un pic semblable est constaté à la même heure (20 heures), le 24 avril, avec une augmentation de 375 % des demandes par rapport au dimanche précédent.
Ce pic n’est égalé, une fois encore, que par le débat du 20 avril. À 21 heures, le trafic était 308 % plus élevé que le mercredi précédent, ce qui signifie que le public était clairement attentif au débat et consultait les sites des médias et des chaînes de télévision. Certains sites français, comme france.tv, diffusaient en streaming.
Conclusion
Lorsque les personnes sont vraiment impatientes de consulter une information aussi importante que les résultats d’une élection, ils cherchent les sites sur lesquels sont diffusées les premiers estimations (dans ce cas, avant 20 heures, heure locale, ils sont situés hors de France).
Par ailleurs, lors de deux échéances électorales différentes en France, à deux semaines d’intervalle, on observe de nettes similitudes dans les tendances Internet qui montrent de quelle façon les personnes utilisent l’Internet en période électorale. Cela devient plus clair lorsque les résultats commencent à arriver, mais un débat aussi important pour une élection présidentielle que le débat Le Pen-Macron a également un impact non seulement sur le trafic Internet, mais également sur l’attention portée aux sites d’information et de télévision.
Vous pouvez garder un œil sur ces tendances grâce à Cloudflare Radar.
The first round of the 2022 French presidential elections were held this past Sunday, April 10, 2022, and a run-off will be held on April 24 between the top two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Looking at Internet trends in France for Sunday, it appears that when people were voting Internet traffic went down, and, no surprise, it went back up when results are coming in — that includes major spikes to news and election-related websites.
Cloudflare Radar data shows that Sundays are usually high-traffic days in France. But this Sunday looked a little different.
The seven-day Radar chart shows that there was a decrease in traffic compared to the previous Sunday between 08:00 and 16:00 UTC, that’s 10:00 and 18:00 in local time — bear in mind that polling stations in France were open between 08:00 and 19:00 (or 20:00 in big cities) local time. So, the decrease in traffic was ‘inside’ the period when French citizens were allowed to vote.
That’s a similar trend we have seen in other elections, like the Portuguese one back in January 2022.
The time of the French election day with the largest difference compared to the previous Sunday was 14:00 UTC (16:00 in local time), when traffic decreased as much as 16% (as the previous 7-day chart shows). That’s clear in this chart:
That doesn’t show us precisely how people use the Internet differently on an election day — note that we already saw in the past how the weather, times of the year or even events affect human behaviour and subsequently Internet trends.
Let’s look deeper into those trends. We know that weekdays, weekends and even Sundays have, in many countries, specific patterns so, when we compare the previous four Sundays in France since March 20, we can see some trends highlighted in the next chart:
April 10, Election Day, was the Sunday with the most traffic of the previous month at 06:30 UTC (08:30 local time) and in several periods between 16:30 and 20:45 UTC (18:30 and 22:45 local time).
April 10, Election Day, was the Sunday with the least traffic of the previous month in several periods between 09:45 and 11:15 (11:45 and 13:15 local time) and it was the #3 out of #4 with less traffic between 12:15 and 16:15 (14:15 and 18:15 local time).
This seems to show patterns such as: before going to vote more people than usual were online on Sunday, Election Day (08:30 local time), but traffic went down considerably in the late morning period between (11:30-13:15) and again after lunch (14:15 and 18:15) shortly before the polling stations were closed.
The first exit polls started to be published around 18:40 local time (seen in the second and biggest green circle in the previous chart), but the main exit poll was at 20:00 local time, when all the polling stations were already closed, at that time Internet traffic in France was at its highest compared to Sundays during the past 30 days (seen in the third green circle in the previous chart, 18:00 UTC).
How about mobile devices’ usage trends? People in France were definitely using their mobile devices more on Election Day, and that is also evident when compared to the previous Sunday, April 3.
On Election Day, April 10, 2022, at around 09:00 local time mobile usage represented 60% of Internet traffic and had another spike at 21:00 local time with 58% (the seven-day average for mobile usage in France is 48%).
When results arrive, people go online
Official websites usually aren’t the most popular sites in a given country, their popularity is mostly connected to when citizens have to fill in their tax forms online or want to see something like election results — although news media outlets are also important there. Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties.
Official French election-related websites like elections.interieur.gouv.fr (where the results are published) had an increase in traffic throughout the week mainly after Monday, April 4, but on election day there were two major spikes.
The first spike in traffic was around 20:00 local time (370% more than the previous Sunday at the same time), when all the polling stations were already closed and the first major polls were revealed. But the main spike was later, at midnight (local time), when 84% of the votes were already counted and published — Macron was leading (27%) followed closely by Le Pen (25%). That spike represented 925% more requests than in the previous Sunday.
The news Internet traffic spike ‘knocks’ at 20:00
When there are elections in a country, people tend to see the analysis and results using media outlets from radio to TV, but also the Internet — media websites and social media. Let’s focus on French media outlets. The biggest spike of the week in our aggregate DNS chart, that shows trends from 12 news websites, was definitely on Election Day, around 20:00 local time, when those domains had 116% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Sunday.
Nonetheless, after 16:00 local time, traffic started to increase to those news outlets and by 18:00 local time it had its largest spike of the week with sustained growth until 20:00. At 23:00 local time there was another increase in traffic and after that it started to decrease. But, this Monday morning, traffic at 08:00 was already higher again than during the previous week (Election Day excluded). So, no surprise, Sunday night was when people were looking more into the news.
The same trend is seen on the major French TV station websites, with an even more isolated spike at 20:00 local time and a 472% increase in traffic compared to the previous Sunday, when the main exit polls were announced.
This was also similar to the broadcast radio website trends. Besides the 20:00 local time spike (272% increase compared to the previous Sunday), there was also a big one at 23:00 local time (300%) and a Monday morning spike with higher than before traffic (82% increase):
How about social media?
Regarding social media in France (looking at the aggregate DNS of the several sites), there’s no clear trend regarding the elections, but there were slightly fewer requests than on the previous Sunday. So social media doesn’t appear to have been as impacted by the elections as news websites.
Conclusion
Although there aren’t big changes in Internet traffic, like those seen in countries that shut down the Internet during election periods, Election Day seems to influence human and Internet patterns, in this case when results started to pour in on election night people went to news or official election websites.
As the election season has ramped down and the new Presidential Administration begins, we think it’s important to assess whether there are lessons we can draw from our experience helping to provide cybersecurity services for those involved in the 2020 U.S. elections.
Cloudflare built the Athenian Project – our project to provide free services to state and local election websites – around the idea that access to the authoritative voting information offered by state and local governments is key to a functioning democracy and that Cloudflare could play an important role in ensuring that election-related websites are protected from cyberattacks intended to disrupt that access. Although the most significant challenges in this election cycle fell outside the realm of cybersecurity, the 2020 election certainly validated the importance of having access to definitive sources of authoritative election information.
We were pleased that the robust cybersecurity preparations we saw for the 2020 U.S. election appeared to be successful. From the Cloudflare perspective, we had the opportunity to witness firsthand the benefits of having access to free cybersecurity services provided to organizations that promote accurate voting information and election results, state and local governments conducting elections, and federal U.S candidates running for office. As we protect many entities in the election space, we have the ability to identify, learn and analyze attack trends targeted at these sites that provide authoritative election information. We hope that we will continue to be able to assist researchers, policymakers and security experts looking to support best practices to protect the integrity of the electoral process.
Supporting free and fair elections
Many state and local governments bolstered their security postures ahead of the 2020 elections. There have been partnerships between governments, organizations, and private companies assisting election officials with the tools and expertise on best ways to secure the democratic process. Additionally, the spread of COVID-19 has prompted unprecedented challenges on how citizens can vote safely and securely.
Before the 2020 U.S. election, we detailed much of the activity targeting those in the election space to prepare for election day. To the relief of security experts, there were no significant publicly reported cybersecurity incidents as Chris Krebs, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the 2020 election described it as “just another Tuesday on the Internet.” On November 12, 2020, a joint statement from the leading election security organizations stated “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history . . . [T]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
At Cloudflare, we had a team of over 50 employees monitoring and addressing any issues to ensure we were providing our highest level of support to those working in the election space. It is important to note that our services do not protect electronic voting boxes or ballot counters; instead, Cloudflare services provide protection to websites, applications, and APIs. But we do protect many websites that provide pertinent information on the electoral process in the United States. This includes a wide range of players in the election space that facilitate voter registration, provide information on polling places, and publish election results. Since the 2016 election, state and local government websites that provide information such as voter registration, polling places, and election results, which have been increasingly targeted with cyberattacks.
Protecting organizations in the election space with Project Galileo
We launched Project Galileo in 2014 to provide a free set of security services to a range of vulnerable groups on the Internet such as human rights organizations, journalists and social justice organizations. Under the project, we currently protect more than 1,400 organizations working in regions all over the world with many organizations that work towards providing accurate voting information, tackling voter suppression, providing resources on voting rights and publishing election results. Cloudflare works with a variety of different types of non-governmental entities under Project Galileo, but we generally put them into two groups: participants, who are granted the benefits of Project Galileo, and partners, who work with us to identify other organizations who might be worth supporting. Our partners are typically larger civil society organizations and high profile NGOs, who work with entities who might benefit from our services and decide who should receive Cloudflare protections under the project.
Many of these organizations need cybersecurity protections well before election day. Belmont University is a private, four-year university located in Nashville, Tennessee. Shortly after the University was selected to be the site of the third and final 2020 U.S. Presidential Debate, the University reached out to Cloudflare asking for assistance. As part of the support for the debate, Belmont launched a new website to provide a centralized space for volunteers, media, and the community to prepare and organize the debate.
The project was quickly accepted to Project Galileo and we worked with Paul Chenoweth, Web Programming Service Manager for Belmont University to tackle concerns over server capacity, visitor traffic, site security, and analytics. Chenoweth explains, “We faced a number of web site challenges in 2008 when the university hosted the Town Hall Presidential Debate and with a totally new set of conditions in 2020, we did not know what to expect. We were worried about our site being taken down by malicious actors but also by unpredictable surges in traffic to the site. The Cloudflare team helped us create firewall rules, lock down our origin, and provided support during the Presidential debate.” Due to the spread of COVID-19, the debate website was the primary source of information for media registration, volunteer applications, and the event calendar for more than 40 themed virtual education events for the community. Overall, the university saw a 5x increase in traffic and blocked more than 80,000 malicious HTTP requests targeting their site.
Read stories from these organizations and Project Galileo here.
Under Project Galileo, we provide powerful cybersecurity tools to assist organizations such as Vote America, U.S. Vote Foundation, Decision Desk HQ, and many more working in the election space to identify and mitigate attacks targeting their web infrastructure. Along with protection from malicious DDoS attacks, our services also help with large influxes of unexpected traffic as organizations tend to see traffic spikes during voter registration deadlines. During the months leading up to elections, many of these organizations provided up to date information on the changing voting processes due to COVID-19. During the ballot count, many organizations posted election results online as state and local governments began reporting official numbers.
Many of the election-related organizations under Project Galileo allow you to register to vote, view the status of your voting ballot, and much more. States often hold their state and presidential primaries on different dates with the earliest primaries for 2020 held in March with 24 states and June with 23 states. When looking at cyberattacks against election organizations during the elections, the Cloudflare WAF blocked more than 10 million attacks in 2020. We can see that the WAF mitigated a majority of attacks during these two months, as many states held elections and voter registration deadlines.
Protecting election websites with the Athenian Project
In 2017, we launched the Athenian Project to provide our highest level of service to U.S. state and local governments running elections. This includes county board of election websites, Secretaries of State, and many smaller municipalities that register citizens to vote and publish election results. Under the Athenian Project, we protect more than 275 election entities in 30 states. In the past year, we onboarded more than 100 government election sites in preparation for the November 3rd election.
Read stories from state and local governments protected under the Athenian project here.
During the month leading up to elections, we had a team of engineers ready to assist state and local governments looking for help protecting their websites from cyberattacks. We onboarded Solano County in California, who engaged with our team on the best way to secure their election resources as we approached November 3rd. “The right to a free and fair election is one of the most basic civil rights we enjoy as Americans; it is a right upon which many of our foundational civil rights depend. Creating the conditions for transparent, clear, and truthful communications about the process and outcomes of elections is crucial to maintain the public trust in our electoral process”, saysTim Flanagan, Chief Information Officer for Solano County. In a few hours, we onboarded the county to Cloudflare and implemented best-practices tailored for election entities that use our services under the Athenian Project. “Cloudflare’s services added additional layers of security to our web presence that raised confidence in our ability to assure County’s residents that our election results were trustworthy.”
Starting in November, we saw traffic to government election sites increase as many people looked for polling places or how to contact local election officials. We also saw those traffic spikes after election day, as many election websites post periodic updates as the counting of ballots ensues. We reported many of these traffic spikes in the Election Dashboard with Cloudflare Radar.
For cyberattacks targeting government election websites, we found a majority of attacks before election day and primarily in September with about 50 million HTTPS requests blocked by the web application firewall.
From November 4 to November 11, the WAF mitigated 16,304,656 malicious requests to sites under the Athenian Project. During this time, many state and local governments were counting ballots and posting election results to their websites. A majority of attacks were blocked by the managed ruleset in the WAF – a set of rules curated by Cloudflare engineers to block against common vulnerabilities – including SQLi, cross-site scripting and cross-site forgery requests. These are not sophisticated attacks that we see, but hackers looking for vulnerabilities to access or modify sensitive information. For example, file inclusion is an attack targeting web applications to upload malware to steal or modify the content of the site.
Protecting Political Campaigns in 2020
In January 2020, we launched Cloudflare for Campaigns, a suite of free security services to federal campaigns with our partnership with Defending Digital Campaigns. During the course of the year, we onboarded 75 campaigns ranging from House, Senate, and Presidential candidates running for election in 2020. At Cloudflare, we have a range of campaigns that use our services ranging from free up to our Enterprise level plan. Overall, we protected more than 450 candidate sites running for federal office in 2020.
In 2020, the average number of attacks on U.S. campaign websites on Cloudflare per month was about 13 million. When comparing attacks against political campaigns and government election sites, we saw more DDoS attacks rather than hackers trying to exploit website vulnerabilities. As depicted below, campaigns used Cloudflare’s layer 7 DDoS protection that automatically monitors and mitigates large DDoS attacks, alongside rate-limiting to mitigate malicious traffic. For election websites, it’s clear that hackers tried to exploit common website vulnerabilities that were blocked by the WAF and firewall rules, with the goal of gaining access to internal systems rather than make the site inaccessible like we see in DDoS attacks.
Lessons learned and how we move forward
We learned a lot from preparing for the 2020 U.S. election while engaging with those in the election space and learned to be flexible in the face of the unexpected. We learned that COVID-19 had impacted many of these groups at a disportionate rate. For example, organizations that work in promoting online voter registration were well suited for the move to online that we found ourselves in during COVID-19. For political candidates, they had to adapt to moving campaign events and outreach to an online environment rather than the traditional campaign operations of door-knocking and large fundraising events. This move online meant that campaigns needed to pay more attention to digital risks.
We also learned as we approached the November election that the election space involves a range of players. Protecting elections requires not only working with governments to secure their websites for the unexpected, but also working with campaigns and non-profit organizations who work on election-related issues. We appreciated the fact that Cloudflare has many different projects that support a range of players working in promoting trust in the electoral process, giving us the flexibility to protect them. Many of these players need different levels of support and assistance with how to properly protect their web infrastructure from cyberattacks, and having a range of projects offering a different level of plans and support, helped us in finding the best way to protect them. We were able to provide a free set of services to a wide range of players each with separate goals but a common mission: providing authoritative information to build trust in the electoral process.
Both the awareness of the importance of election security and election security itself has improved since the 2016 election. We have seen the benefits of sharing information across many partners, organizations, and local players. To help prepare state and local governments for elections, we conducted webinars and security tunings sessions for many of these election players. In the case of state and local governments we protect under the Athenian Project, as we conducted more security training, we saw many participants recommend others in their state to ensure they were protected as well. For example, a week before the general election, the Wisconsin Election Commission sent an election security reminder with resources on how to mitigate a DDoS attack with Cloudflare to county and municipal clerks across Wisconsin.
At Cloudflare, we worked with a variety of government agencies to share threat information that we saw targeted against these participants. Days before the November 3rd election, we were invited to the last meeting conducted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to share threats data we had seen against government election websites and how they could be mitigated to more than 200 general election stakeholders, including counties across the United States.
Weeks after the election, I spoke with Stacy Mahaney, the Chief Information Officer at the Missouri Secretary of State, which is currently protected under the Athenian Project. His comment aptly summarized Cloudflare’s security practices. “Security is like an onion. Every layer of security that you add protects against various layers of attack or exposure. We were able to add layers to our security defenses with Cloudflare. The more layers you add, the more difficult it is for attackers to succeed in making voters question the trust of the democratic process that we work to protect every day.” Information security is about prevention and detection and is a continual process that involves monitoring, training, and threat analysis. By adding more layers including tools such as a web application firewall, 2FA, SSL encryption, authentication protocols, and security awareness training, it makes it more difficult for hackers to penetrate through the security layers.
Although cybersecurity experts concluded that the 2020 election was one of the safest in the history of elections, the work is not done yet. Not only will future U.S. election cycles begin again soon, but election security is a global concern that benefits from the involvement of experienced players with appropriate expertise. The longer we engage with those working with those in the election space, the more we learn the best ways to protect their web infrastructure and internal teams. We look forward to continuing our work to protect resources in the voting process and help build trust in democratic institutions.
There is significant global attention around the upcoming United States election. Through the Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns, Cloudflare is providing free protection from cyber attacks to a significant number of state and local elections’ websites, as well as those of federal campaigns.
One of the bedrocks of a democracy is that people need to be able to get access to relevant information to make a choice about the future of their country. This includes information about the candidates up for election; learning about how to register, and how to cast a vote; and obtaining accurate information on the results.
A question that I’ve been increasingly asked these past few months: are cyberattacks going to impact these resources leading up to and on election day?
Internally, we have been closely monitoring attacks on the broader elections and campaign websites and have a team standing by 24×7 to help our current customers as well as state and local governments and eligible political campaigns to protect them at no cost from any cyberattacks they may see.
The good news is that, so far, cyberattacks have not been impacting the websites of campaigns and elections officials we are monitoring and protecting. While we do see some background noise of attacks, they have not interfered in the process so far. The attack traffic is below what we saw in 2016 and below what is typical in elections we have observed in other countries.
But there are still nearly two weeks before election day so our guard is up. We thought it was important to provide a view into how overall traffic to campaign and elections sites is trending as well as a view into the cyberattacks we’re observing. To that end, today we’re sharing data from our internal monitoring systems publicly through Cloudflare Radar. You can access the special “Election 2020” Radar dashboard here:
The dashboard is updated continuously with information we’re tracking on traffic to elections-related sites, both legitimate and from cyberattacks. It is normal to see fluctuations in this traffic depending on the time of day as well as when there will be occasional cyberattacks. So far, nothing here surprises us.
It’s important to note that Cloudflare does not see everything. We do not, for instance, have any view into misinformation campaigns that may be on social media. We also do not protect every state and local government or every campaign.
That said, we have Athenian Project participants in more than half of US states — including so-called red states, blue states, purple states, and several of the battleground states. We also have hundreds of federal campaigns that are using us ranging across the political spectrum. While we may not see a targeted cyberattack, given the critical role the web now plays to the election process, we believe we would likely see any wide-spread attacks attempting to disrupt the US elections.
So far, we are not seeing anything that suggests such an attack has impacted the election to date.
Our team will continue to monitor the situation. If any state or local elections agency or campaigns comes under attack, we stand ready to help at no cost through the Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns.
We could not have built Cloudflare into the company it is today without a stable, functional government. In the United States, that process depends on democracy and fair elections not tainted by outside influence like cyberattacks. We believe it is our duty to provide our technology where we can to help ensure this election runs smoothly.
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