Ahead of midterms, states scrambling to fend off cyberattacks

With the 2018 midterm elections fast approaching, security experts are warning that the nation’s election infrastructure will once again come under assault by hackers seeking to undermine American democracy.

But here’s an underappreciated fact: We’re already under attack.

“We average 100,000 scans on our [computer] systems a day,” Missouri’s secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, told a recent Senate panel examining election security. He was referring to unauthorized probing of the networks.

Mr. Ashcroft and other state election officials were asked how often they detect attempts specifically to break into voter-registration and other election-related systems.

“Every day,” responded Vermont’s secretary of state, Jim Condos. “We probably receive several thousand scans per day.”

Steve Simon, Minnesota’s secretary of state, compared the frequent attempted cyber-intrusions he sees to a car thief casing