The majority of hacker attacks on the server of the Central Election Commission (CEC) carried out on the day of the presidential elections, May 25, came from the Russian Federation, according to a press release from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
“SBU experts detected and suppressed numerous hacker attacks against the CEC’s official Web site and Elections system. Attacks on the CEC server were conducted continuously with various levels of intensity, but they didn’t succeed. According to the information analysis, most of the attacks were engineered from the territory of the Russian Federation and involved botnets,” reads a statement released by the SBU on Tuesday.
An organized hacker group was arrested in Kyiv following a criminal investigation. The group was preparing to damage CEC information resources and throw doubt on the election results. Urgent procedural activities to document these illegal activities are ongoing. Confiscated technical devices, including Internet and WiFi network monitoring and hacking units, as well as special Russian software, were sent for examination.
Two servers rented by a Russian citizen, which were damage by a virus, were found and blocked in Vinnytsia. According to the press center, by gaining unauthorized access to the servers of hosting-provider “Besthosting,” the hackers generated a powerful DDOS-attack against the CEC information resources (with capacity over 200,000 packages per second). Therefore, relevant criminal proceedings have been registered.
Intentions to overload communication landlines by uninterrupted automatic calling to the electoral districts in Ternopil, Zhytomyr, Poltava and Volyn regions were prevented.
“Together with the CEC, the [SBU] uncovered and in sufficient time deactivated malicious software embedded into the electronic data processing system. Thus, a special information campaign to discredit the election results engineered by Russia was stopped (Dmytro Yarosh was supposed to be declared leader of the elections with 37% of the vote). Unaware of the virus’s deactivation by the Ukrainian special service, Channel One Russia released a provocative report with comments on the result that the virus on the CEC Web site was to have generated,” the SBU noted.
The intention to redirect the results of electronic voting protocols to an unauthorized IP-address was revealed and prevented at one of the district election commissions in Dnipropetrovsk region. By means of previously installed software offenders were trying to fake election results in the region and thus discredit the overall results of presidential elections in Ukraine. The threat was contained and criminal proceedings were registered in response.
