More than 90,000 cyber attacks on Russian election resources were thwarted on the first day of the country’s presidential elections, Rostelecom Senior Vice President for Information Security Igor Lapunov said via video conference at the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Russia.
According to him, cyber attacks can be traced back to Ukraine and IP addresses in Western Europe and North America.
“Over 90,000 cyber attacks were carried out on election web portals, CEC resources and online voting, and on the public services portal ‘Gosuslugi’. This is a large number, which eight times exceeds the number of cyber attacks registered on the Single Voting Day last year. All attacks were rejected,” he said.
Lapunov pointed out that judging by the professionalism of cyber attacks, it can be said that they are carried out by professional, special groups.
According to the latest data from the Central Election Commission, 51.77 percent of voters voted by 2:00 p.m.
“Since the start of voting, 160,000 hacker attacks have been carried out on the online voting system,” said CEC President Ela Pamfilova.
She added that 18,000 attacks were carried out on the CEC website, of which 141 can be classified as high risk.
According to CEC data, on January 1 of this year, the number of voters in Russia was over 112 million, and more than 1,890,000 people outside the country’s borders.
