News, 14.03.2024, 11:30 AM
As Russia prepares for presidential elections this week, its systems are reportedly being targeted by “massive” cyber attacks, according to local authorities.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will have three opponents in the elections that will be held from March 15 to 17.
Last week, a Russian state official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that hackers from “Western countries” were planning and already organizing cyber attacks on Russia's election infrastructure.
“It is good that our electoral system proved to be resistant to external cyber influence, but it is also an indicator of how much enemy pressure is on the Russian state,” said the special representative of the Russian Foreign Minister Gennady Askaldovich.
Ela Pamfilova, head of the Russian Electoral Commission, also said last week that Russia's “enemies” are trying to interfere in the country's presidential election “like never before” with hacking attacks. Pamfilova said that due to cyber attacks on the services and websites of the election commission, electronic voting was enabled only in those regions where “its security is guaranteed”.
Russia's National Computer Incident Coordination Center (CERT) also issued a warning to online voters about escalating cyber threats, including those that could originate from Ukraine and its allied countries. In a statement, CERT warned that cybercriminals will try to discredit the elections, raise social tensions, spread fake news and infect the devices of online voters with malware. The agency advised users to be cautious about phishing websites posing as electronic voting services. CERT also warned of emails and messages containing malicious links, allegedly originating from Russian state agencies.
This week, Russia's foreign intelligence service accused the US of trying to interfere in Russian elections and cyberattacks on the online voting system. The White House denied this.
“These allegations are false and nothing more than propaganda,” a spokesman for the White House National Security Council told Reuters. “The USA has not and will not interfere in the Russian elections. It is Russia that has a long history of attacking American and other democratic elections.”
Last week, the Kremlin said Russia would not meddle in the upcoming US presidential election in November and rejected suggestions that Moscow was behind the 2016 and 2020 US presidential election meddling campaigns.
So far, there have been no publicly known cases of Russian state websites being taken down, and none of the prominent Ukrainian hacking groups have announced that they have carried out such attacks.
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