In what experts have called the first reported attempt to cyberattack a U.S. election, more than 2,500 “phantom requests” for absentee ballots were sent to Miami-Dade County elections website according to a grand jury report flagged by NBC News Monday.

All the requests were detected and rejected, but the incident has nonetheless raised concerns about cyberthreats to online voting systems. The improper requests came from a small number of computer IP addresses overseas, which drew the attention of election workers. As NBC noted, "it is not clear whether the bogus requests were an attempt to influence a specific race, test the system or simply interfere with the voting." The originators of the phantom requests could not be traced, the grand jury report noted, as they used proxy servers that make Internet activity untraceable.

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NBC noted that while there have been allegations of U.S. election system rigging in the past, experts believe this incident to be the first (although long-anticipated) documented cyberattack attempt. Via NBC: