Soooooo much wrong with this story. In general, just ignore everything you see about cybersecurity in the general press until you find a tech journalist on it.

Increasing number of attacks is not news; it’s to be expected. The question is, is it the number of attackers or the size of the attacks? Size doesn’t matter; you can attack any network 1 billion times for around $1,000, but those methods are worthless for data extraction.

“All potential attacks were stopped or mitigated.” Both halves of this sentence are wrong. It’s not all potential attacks, it’s all *detected* attacks and no expert would want to warrant 100%.

Also, mitigated? If you attack Facebook intending to steal all accounts, and they lock you out after 800 million, that’s a mitigation. That word is terrifying. And what it means is: some attacks HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL. You don’t mitigate the ones that aren’t.

The Vermont governor saying that all’s well because of yesterday’s backups is merely standard level ignorant. Have they tried restoring them? Have they tested whether the backups are secure?

Here’s the deal: any computer scientist can tell you, and some have been since the 1990s, that the electronic infrastructure supporting voting is a raging trash fire. If our financial systems worked like this, we’d be trading beads and pelts. Announcements like this one are generally intended to point you to where they want you to look (possibly later claiming a Democratic win is illegitimate), so you’re distracted from everything we’ve known for 20 years. DHS finds increasing attempts to hack U.S. election systems ahead of midterms