GAO Accepts Schatz, Pallone Request for Review of FCC's Claims of May DDoS Attack

The GAO accepted a request from House Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, to do an independent review of the FCC’s claim that a May distributed denial-of-service attack caused outages to its electronic comment filing system (see 1705080042 and 1708170042), a GAO spokesman said. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told Pallone, Schatz and other lawmakers a “non-traditional” DDoS attack hit the ECFS but the FCC declined to provide specific details on plans to protect ECFS against future attacks (see 1706280044 and 1707310071). The lawmakers repeatedly have questioned the FCC’s claims and previously sought GAO and FBI probes (see 1705310024 and 1707070039). The probe is “now in the queue,” but the GAO’s investigative work “won’t get underway for several months,” the spokesman said. "The scope won’t be determined until the work starts."