Russia reports massive cyberattacks on its remote voting system

MOSCOW, RUSSIA| Xinhua | Russian election authorities said Saturday that about 160,000 cyberattacks on the country’s remote electronic voting resources were blocked.

The attacks were mainly directed toward the voting portal, with 30,000 attacks launched against the monitoring portal for the remote electronic voting system, said Ella Pamfilova, head of the Russian Central Election Commission.

Pamfilova noted that the cyberattack activity increased significantly on Saturday from Friday and ended in failures.

Vadim Kovalev, head of the Public Headquarters for Election Observation in Moscow, said Saturday that cyberattacks on Moscow’s information systems were traced to the United States and Britain.

“We see that most of the servers where the attacks come from are located in the U.S. and the UK, at least it is the way they are detected,” Kovalev said.

Russia’s eighth presidential election is scheduled for March 15-17. Remote electronic voting is introduced to parts of the country for the first time.