Russian Online Voting System Suffers DDoS-Attack Coming From US, German, Ukrainian IPs

3 hours ago (Updated: 2 hours ago)

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Tim Korso

The Russian authorities previously summoned the US ambassador to demand that Washington stop interfering in the general election in the country taking place between 17 and 19 September.

The online voting system in Russia suffered denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on 17 September coming from IP addresses registered in the US, Germany, and Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media has stated. The attacks came as both in-person and online general election voting kicked off in Russia.

The ministry said there have been two waves of attacks: the first targeted the election monitoring system and was launched at 8:00 a.m. local time (5:00 GMT), while the second targeted the voting authentication system and was spotted at 10:36 a.m. local time (7:36 GMT).

Over 50% of the mass requests used in the DDoS attacks to take down the online services by overwhelming their capacity to process them, came from US IPs. Over 25% came from German IPs and 5% more from Ukraine. The ministry did not disclose other sources behind the DDoS attacks, but said that they were definitely organised and aimed to thwart the holding of elections in Russia.

"[We] successfully dealt with technically prepared, targeted DDoS attacks. There was no degradation and disruptions in the operation of [voting] services. Users' personal data remained protected", the ministry's statement read.

At the same time, public headquarters for observing elections in Moscow reported that the election monitoring system was suffering small lags due to DDoS attacks, but stressed that they have no effect on the results of the voting and that all ballots are being successfully registered on the blockchain platform.

"We have DDoS attacks at the same time, maybe not very huge, but, nevertheless, frontal", head of the public headquarters for observing elections in Moscow, Alexey Venediktov said.

https://sputniknews.com/20210917/russian-online-voting-system-suffers-ddos-attack-coming-from-us-german-ukrainian-ips-1089154408.html