US Federal Election Commission filing system offline after hacking attempt before midterms

What happened

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) took its electronic filing system offline after an attempted hacking, according to a Reuters report that cited an internal FEC email. The system has not worked since the evening of 26 October, when it stopped at about 22:00 Eastern time, according to the FEC. A notice on the commission's website says the filing system is offline and that its IT staff are working to restore the service. Reuters first reported on Tuesday, 27 October, that hackers had targeted the commission.

How the commission responded

A person familiar with the matter told POLITICO that hackers tried to access some of the agency's filing systems, prompting staff to shut down the parts under attack. That person asked not to be named because the internal investigation is still ongoing. The source described the intrusion as narrow and compartmentalised, and said the cybersecurity team noticed the attempts early. Some of the agency's systems were still down on Tuesday evening, 27 October, POLITICO reported. None of the reports names the person or group behind the attempt, and none states what, if anything, was reached.

Impact on campaign finance reporting

The outage prevents committees from filing their daily reports of campaign spending, the reporting channel campaigns use for election-related data. The FEC does not organise elections itself. Its job is to oversee campaign finance and the honesty of campaigns. The electronic system is a public register that shows the spending of individual campaign committees, and the FEC also maintains a public list of campaign donors. Blick reported that the agency monitors how much candidates for the House of Representatives or the Senate raise and spend, and which organisations or large donors fund political advertising.

Midterm context

The disruption came one week before the midterm elections on 3 November, when parts of Congress are up for election. Der Standard reported that those votes will decide whether President Donald Trump's Republicans keep their majorities in Congress for the next two years. Der Standard said the filing portal had been unreachable since Monday evening, and it was the email seen by Reuters that revealed the cause. Blick put the start of the failure at around 22:00 Eastern time on Monday, which it gave as 3:00 Swiss time on Tuesday.

Open questions

The reports do not say how long the outage will last or when the full system will return. Sources also do not state whether any campaign data was accessed or changed. The articles describe the attempt only as a hacking or intrusion attempt, so the attacker's identity and motive remain unknown. Campaigns that need to file daily reports before election day will depend on the FEC restoring the system.