DIU Hackers Attack the Russian CEC on Day of Illegal Elections

The cyber specialists of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine carried out a large-scale DDoS attack on the resources of the Russian Central Election Commission.

The agency told Militarnyi that the purpose of the operation was to disrupt online voting during the illegal elections in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

The cyberattack took place on September 14th, the so-called single voting day in Russia.

Russian authorities organized elections not only in their regions but also in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

The DDoS attack disrupted several key digital resources involved in the voting process.

The servers of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation and the remote electronic voting platform used to elect mayors and governors in Russian regions were affected.

The impact has also been made on Rostelecom’s backbone routers and the servers of the state digital services portal Gosuslugi.

The cyberattack partially paralyzed online voting services. A significant number of Russians were unable to cast their votes during the elections.

The head of the Russian CEC, Ella Panfilova, spoke emotionally about the attack, saying: “The Internet has gone down in the CEC building – the attack is ongoing.”

Problems with access to remote voting services were also confirmed by Roskomnadzor. They noted that due to failures in the Rostelecom network, traffic on the backbone infrastructure was degraded.

According to official data from the Russian agency, 99 cyberattacks on public services were recorded within a few hours, lasting a total of about four hours.

Recently, the DIU’s cyber corps also attacked one of the largest private Internet service providers that cooperates with Russian security forces.