Hacking attempts against US Federal Election Commission system triggered outage, email shows

NEW YORK, Oct 27 : The US Federal Election Commission's website has been targeted by a hacker or hackers, disrupting the agency's electronic filings system a week before the November 3 elections, according to an email seen by Reuters.

In a statement, the FEC said that, "at this time, the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service." The FEC, which tracks the spending of candidates and political committees, said that users could still search the website for past reports. It declined further comment on the outage.

The hacking attempts come a week before the midterm elections, which will determine whether President Donald Trump's Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress for the next two years. 

The FEC does not play a role in administering US elections and the outage should have no effect on voters' ability to cast ballots.

The outage prevents organizations from filing the FEC's 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, which show how much political groups and others are spending on specific races.

"I've never seen this in 26 years," said Steven Mele, a partner at political finance compliance firm MBA Consulting Group. "The result is there will be less disclosure on the elections" until it's fixed. 

A status message posted by the FEC noted that its filing system had been down since around 10 p.m. ET on Monday (0200 GMT Tuesday). The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI did not immediately return messages seeking comment.