Athenian Project Turns One: Are Election Websites Safer?

The Cloudflare Athenian Project was launched one year ago to provide free Enterprise-level service to election and voter registration websites run by state and local governments in the US. Since then, it has helped over 100 entities in 24 states protect their websites from various malicious attacks aimed at undermining the integrity of elections. On November 6th, the project team mobilized to help on-board over 30 new county-level websites and managed unpredictably large amounts of legitimate traffic during the US midterm elections. The aggregated election day data showed a significant increase in engagement with nearly three times the number of requests compared to September or any other month preceding it. No evidence of coordinated attacks across the election websites was found, but various attacks were stopped by rules within Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall (WAF). Looking forward to 2019, the project aims to continue improving its reach and encouraging SSL adoption among website administrators.