A cyberattack targeting the Federal Election Commission (FEC) disrupted mandatory campaign finance disclosures just days before the November 3 midterm elections. According to the FEC’s official incident report, its electronic filing system experienced an outage beginning October 26, with service restored October 28.
Reuters reported that the nearly 41-hour disruption prevented political groups from submitting required 24- and 48-hour spending reports, temporarily limiting public visibility into last-minute election spending.
The outage occurred as super PACs and other political groups accelerated spending ahead of Election Day. These groups averaged more than $50 million in daily spending during the preceding week, with more than $250 million reported on October 20 alone.
Separately, OpenAI is establishing an Election Operations Center to monitor potential election interference and misuse of its AI tools ahead of the midterms. According to POLITICO, hundreds of employees will monitor events in real time, investigate suspected policy violations and respond to attempts to misuse its tools such.
The operation will continue until all votes are counted.
For a little more reading, try these links.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/28/openai-election-war-room-interference-01137690
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/openai-launching-election-war-room-213133282.html
Do we know anyone who works for DHS?
A group of hackers calling themselves the Department of Peace says it stole and published the personal details of more than 41,000 people working for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The department says it is aware of a potential breach.
The group, which also claimed the theft of contract documents from the DHS in March, gave the data to Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, who published it in collaboration with the transparency collective DDoSecrets. The latter also published the BlueLeaks data dump that listed law enforcement officers’ details in 2020.
The aim of publishing the data was to replace “anonymity with accountability,” DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best said in an online statement.
According to TechCrunch, timestamps on the records suggest the data was taken around mid-August. The group said it had launched the attack in response to a July 17 statement by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in which he promised to “turn up the heat” with traffic stops.
What was stolen?
The data files published online, which the publishers have called “Icepick,” span staff at nearly 7,000 offices. They include the names, work email addresses, phone numbers, office addresses, job titles and membership in internal DHS groups. The employees impacted include almost 6,600 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees. ICE is the DHS unit responsible for immigration enforcement and deportations in the US.
The dataset also carried details of over 21,000 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees, along with information on people who work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).