The Georgia secretary of state's office said that its online security experts stopped a cyberattack earlier this month, the intention of which was to crash the state's absentee voter website.
The office was first alerted to a potential issue when staff noticed a dramatic spike in attempts to gain access to the site, sources told ABC News affiliate WSB-TV.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operations officer for the secretary of state's office, confirmed the details to ABC News.
The office also told WSB-TV that its computer experts quickly prevented it from becoming a major issue for Georgia voters, calling it "a big win for the good guys."
The cyberattack consisted of more than 420,000 nearly simultaneous attempts to access the state’s absentee voter portal from around the world. The coordinated flood of entries, late in the afternoon of Oct.14, was intended to make the site crash and become unavailable to Georgia voters.
Oct. 14 was the last day to register to vote in the state of Georgia.
“We are a target. We are the center of the political universe. Our absentee ballot portal is live right now in the middle of an election. It is a ripe and juicy target for bad actors and enemy powers,” Sterling said.
Sterling told WSB-TV that, most likely, a majority of the attempts to access the portal were carried out by bots. “These different login attempts were from all over the globe,” Sterling said. “Many of these entities and these computers have been used in previous attacks.”
But, Sterling added: "We identified it and attempted to mitigate it immediately."
Sterling told ABC News that the attempted breach had the "hallmarks" of a foreign attack, based on his discussion with cyber experts.
However, he told WSB-TV that because of the safeguards in place, the only effect for voters was a brief slowdown on the absentee ballot portal. “By having these resources in place to begin with, we have lowered the likelihood of such an attack being attempted in the future,” Sterling said.
As of Wednesday evening, officials don’t know who was behind the attempted cyberattack or who coordinated it.
-ABC News' Olivia A. Rubin and T. Michelle Murphy