U.S. government prepares for Election Day cyber attacks

The United States government is readying itself for a range of possible cyber attacks it fears could come on Election Day.

The White House is working alongside the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security to guard against disinformation campaigns, internet slow-downs and other types of digital assault, according to NBC.

A disinformation campaign is the most likely possibility. In a campaign season that's been marked by hackers and leaked documents, news of another round of such documents wouldn't be surprising to voters. But government officials told NBC they're concerned internet sleuths could use a fake document dump as a last-minute attempt to sway voters in one direction or another.

Twitter users with malicious intent could also try to spread misinformation by, say, calling a state for Donald Trump when it has yet to be called at all. Then, if the state is officially called for Clinton, officials worry voters will feel someone is fraudulently altering the results.

Officials didn't tell NBC much about their specific plans to combat misinformation campaigns, only that they would be ready to correct it.

Government officials are also concerned with a possible attempt to slow down internet access for Americans who, on the morning of Election Day, are likely to search the web for how to find their polling place. Even if they already know the name of their voting station, many are likely to turn to the internet for directions.

A distributed denial of service attack such as the one directed at Dyn in October could limit access to much of the internet. Dyn provides domain name service to major websites such as Twitter and Spotify, allowing regular users to access those sites by typing in a url. Hackers using a type of malware known as Mirai broke into thousands of devices hooked up to the internet, such as smart cameras, and targeted Dyn with junk data from those devices, preventing regular users from accessing it. With Dyn offline, much of the internet was either mind-numbingly slow or outright inaccessible.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security said they're prepared to work with major telecom companies such as Verizon and Comcast to lessen the impact of such an an assault.

Other attacks -- such as an assault on the electrical grid -- are far less likely due to the difficulty they would take to pull off.

In any event, it may not be a bad idea to look up directions to your polling station before you wake up on Nov. 8 and to think twice about what you read on Twitter.