Russian Electronic Voting System Struck by 19 DDoS Attacks in One Day

Yandex, the Russian technology and search engine powerhouse, disclosed last week that it had been hit by one of the world’s biggest DDoS attacks ever recorded. 

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack involves flooding a website or service with a large amount of internet traffic until it stops working and eventually goes down.
Cybercriminals have been known to create botnets and launch DDoS attacks using hacked systems or vulnerable/exposed Internet of Things (IoT) devices. 

Russia’s remote electronic voting system has now become the next victim of the campaign, as to what appears to be a continuation of targeted DDoS attacks. 

According to reports, the 8th Russian State Duma (lower house) elections took place between September 17 and September 19. Voters had to head to the polls to cast their vote for the heads of nine Russian regions and 39 regional parliaments. 

According to Russian news agency Tass, remote electronic voting took place in six locations, including Sevastopol and the regions of Kursk, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov, and Yaroslavl. 

Around 19 DDoS attempts were thwarted, according to Mikhail Oseevsky, president of Rostelecom. The head of the country’s major digital service provider, Rostelecom, told the reporters at the Central Election Commission’s information centre that some of the DDoS assaults were very short, spanning only a few minutes, while the biggest lasted 5 hours and 32 minutes. 

“It (the DDoS attack) began early in the morning and ended in the middle of the day,” Oseevsky disclosed. 

Many of the country’s digital resources, including the elections, state services websites, and the CEC’s portal, were attacked, according to Oseevsky. 

He continued by stating that there have been several efforts to launch large-scale attacks on these resources. The department, on the other hand, was well-prepared to combat and minimise the threat, according to the president. 

The assaults arose from a number of different countries which include: 

According to the elections commission, three targeted cyberattacks were documented from abroad, two of which targeted the centre’s main website and the third was a DDoS attack.