Pamfilova noted that the cyberattack activity increased significantly on Saturday from Friday and ended in failure….reports Asian Lite News
Russian election authorities have said 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, Ella Pamfilova, head of the Russian Central Election Commission, was quoted as saying on Saturday by Xinhua news agency.
Pamfilova noted that the cyberattack activity increased significantly on Saturday from Friday and ended in failure.
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 US and the UK.
“We see that most of the servers where the attacks come from are located in the US 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.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is running for the country’s top office again as an independent candidate, cast his electronic vote in the presidential elections, Russia-based TASS reported.
Footage released by the Kremlin showed Putin walking towards a computer in his office, casting his vote and then smiling and waving at the camera. A notification on the computer monitor then read that a vote had been successfully cast.
It was not the first time that Putin cast his vote online. In the last few years, the Russian President cast his vote online during the autumn single election day.
The ongoing polling to elect the Russian President marks the first time that online voting has been made available, according to TASS report.
More than 3.5 million people cast their vote online on the first day of the presidential election across Russia, TASS reported, citing the e-voting monitoring portal.
As of 7:28 pm (local time), as many as 3,500,331 ballots were issued to voters in 28 Russian regions, who had applied for voting online. The federal platform of electronic voting recorded a 73 per cent voter turnout on the first day, TASS reported.
As many as 4.76 million people in Russia planned to cast votes on the federal platform, the state agency reported, adding that people in Moscow could vote on the city’s own platform and were not required to apply for remote voting prior to the polls.
More than 180 election experts from 58 countries are overseeing the Russian presidential election. They are witnessing the elections at the invitation of the Russian Civic Chamber’s (CC) invitation, the CC said in a statement on the Telegram channel, TASS reported.
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