Russia Reports Massive Cyberattacks on Its Remote Voting System

On Saturday, Ella Pamfilova, the president of the Central Election Commission (CEC), confirmed that about 160,000 cyberattacks on the Russian remote electronic voting resources were blocked.

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The attacks were mainly directed toward the voting portal, with 30,000 attacks launched against the monitoring portal for the remote electronic voting system.

The CEC President 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," he 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. 

In these elections, four candidates are running for the presidency: Vladislav Davankov (New People Party), President Vladimir Putin (independent candidate), Leonid Slutski (Liberal Democratic Party), and Nikolai Yaritonov (Communist Party).