FEC Brings Filing System Back Online After 41-Hour Cyberattack Conceals $250M in Spending

The Federal Election Commission brought its electronic filing system back online Wednesday night after taking it offline for nearly 41 hours to contain a cyberattack. The outage suspended the agency's ability to process mandatory disclosures from political groups at a time when daily spending had reached its highest levels in the two-year cycle. During the period, Super PACs and dark money groups could not file the required 24-hour and 48-hour reports that detail their financial activities.

Campaign finance experts noted that the timing of the disruption obscured a surge in political spending. Brendan Glavin, research director at OpenSecrets, reported that outside groups spent an average of over $50 million per day in the week preceding the outage. On October 20 alone, reported spending exceeded $250 million. Molly White, a watchdog who tracks spending by crypto and Big Tech sectors, stated that the system failure removed visibility into last-minute expenditures as the election approached.

"We didn’t have access to the last-minute spending, which is really ramped up as the election draws nearer," White said. She added that the lack of filing data was devastating for transparency efforts so close to the vote. The FEC initially posted a notice just after 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, stating it was investigating a problem that caused major outages across its electronic campaign filing systems.

An FEC officer informed campaign compliance firms late Monday that the agency took services offline after a "bad actor" attempted to breach its systems, according to an email reviewed by Reuters. To regain access, campaign finance managers were required to reset their passwords before logging back in. The agency did not announce specific details regarding the cause of the breach and did not return requests for comment on Wednesday. Both the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred questions back to the FEC.

Hilary Braseth, executive director of OpenSecrets, released a statement before the system was restored, arguing that delayed disclosure effectively denied the public access to information. She described transparency as a fundamental public safeguard when hundreds of millions of dollars in outside money flow into political airwaves in the final days of an election. Kyle Sandy, cybersecurity director at Logically, said the decision to take the system offline was a correct move to manage an attack that could not be immediately scoped.

The FEC stated that most affected services have been restored. The agency does not administer U.S. elections, so the outage did not impact voters' ability to cast ballots. The lack of information from the commission during the three-day outage led to speculation within the industry regarding the motive behind the hacking attempt.