Cloudflare: NEW Super Tuesday Data: Attacks + traffic regarding elections
Cloudflare (handles ~20% of the world Internet) has published the analysis and data findings of international elections and results from a survey of election officials regarding their biggest concerns this election season, as well as recent data from Super Tuesday.
Highlights below:
Under the Athenian Project, we identified 100 websites in the 16 states conducting elections on Super Tuesday and observed a considerable increase in traffic after Monday, March 4th.
On March 5th, we identified an increase in human traffic to these sites, resulting from people visiting these websites to identify their polling place locations, or view up to date election results.
Under Cloudflare Campaigns, we identified 49 websites that are located in the states that conducted an election during Super Tuesday. In total, we protect 97 campaign websites and 27 political party websites.
Traffic to these websites began to grow the weekend ahead of Super Tuesday, with peaks at March 4th and 5th – a majority of the traffic was to political parties protected under the project in these Super Tuesday states, with 53% of the traffic identified going to these party websites.
Under Project Galileo, Cloudflare protects 65 Internet properties in the United States that work on a range of topics related to voting rights and promoting free and fair elections.
Super Tuesday resulted in a considerable spike in traffic to these websites around 09:00 EST of 3.22M requests, which far surpassed the previous maximum value of 1.56M on February 20th at 11:00 EST, a 2x increase.
What keeps state and local election officials up at night: To help prepare for the 2024 general elections in the United States, Cloudflare sent a survey to state and local governments protected under the Athenian Project about what worries them in terms of online security threats.
A majority of participants believe that the use of generative AI tools will have a significant impact on the 2024 election.
80% of participants surveyed indicated that their team has experienced an email phishing attack in the last year.
Trust and reputation is the highest concern when it comes to a cyber attack with election operations as a close second.
Internet trends during international elections:
In Indonesia, a country with more than 200 million voters (and a 275 million population), daily traffic dropped a bit on election day, 5% compared with the previous week. Hourly traffic, during the day, dropped as much as 15% between 08:00 and 13:00 local time, when polling stations were open. On the other hand, mobile devices’ usage was at its highest in 2024, representing 77% of all Internet traffic in the country.
In Pakistan, election day, on February 8, came with an Internet shutdown focused on mobile networks that was criticized by Amnesty International. Our data shows that the outage started around 02:00 UTC, and started to recover after 15:00.
You can find the full blog here. Please let us know if you have any questions or would like to speak to a Cloudflare spokesperson on these findings.
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