Russia thwarts more than 90,000 cyber attacks on first day of voting

"We recorded more than 90,000 cyber attacks against election websites, the infrastructure of the Central Election Commission (CEC), the online voting website and the Gosuslugi public service portal.

This is a large number, eight times higher than the number of cyber attacks on the day of voting last year. All attacks were prevented," said Igor Lapunov, Senior Vice President of Information Security at Rostelecom and Director of the Solar Energy Company, at the Central Election Commission (CEC) conference on March 16.

According to Mr. Lapunov, through tracing, authorities determined that the IP addresses of the servers that carried out the attacks were located in Ukraine, Western Europe and the United States.

The Russian presidential election will take place over three days, March 15-17. (Photo: Reuters)

"Based on our assessment, we can determine that the hacker groups that carried out these incidents were very professional," Lapunov added.

Earlier, on March 15, RT quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin as saying that Moscow would take action to respond to Ukraine's attacks on many border areas; at the same time, affirming that this was an act of sabotage of the presidential election taking place in Russia.

The statement was made during a meeting with permanent members of the Russian National Security Council. He condemned Kiev's attempts to sabotage the ongoing elections and vowed to respond to the attacks.

The Kremlin chief accused Kiev of planning this operation in advance to disrupt the election in Russia through drone and artillery attacks on various civilian infrastructure, as well as infiltration into the country's territory. The Russian president condemned Kiev's actions as " militarily senseless and a violation of international law."

The Russian presidential election took place over three days from March 15 to 17. Accordingly, the four candidates participating in this race include the representative of the New People's Party, Vladislav Davankov; self-nominated candidate and incumbent President Vladimir Putin; candidate Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) Nikolay Kharitonov.

Kong Anh (Source: TASS)

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