MOSCOW, September 21./TASS/. The Central Election Commission reported nine major cyberattacks on resources from abroad during the legislative elections on September 17-19, Igor Borisov from the CEC said on Tuesday.
"It is clear that we felt attacks on digital resources of the CEC, which were successfully rebuffed," Borisov told a meeting of the upper house’s Ad Hoc Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty and Preventing Interference in the Domestic Affairs of the Russian Federation.
He said that on the voting days alone, "two attacks were reported, aimed to reveal possible vulnerabilities of the CEC site, that lasted over seven hours overall."
He also mentioned three distributed DDoS attacks with a total duration of up to one hour, and four distributed multi-vector attacks aimed at introducing alien software on the CEC website in order to disrupt its functioning, with a total duration of up to one hour. Most of the attacks came from foreign IP addresses, Borisov stressed.
He also noted that the number of negative stories about the elections in Russia multiplied in the media in the EU, the US and Canada. "Thus, in the first days of September we saw no positive information whatsoever in the NATO countries, in the US and Canada. There were isolated publications, at the start of September we saw three to four publications with negative information. By the time the voting began, the number of these publications grew tenfold - 40 or more publications were fed daily to the readers, and those who watched TV and listened to the radio. Moreover, these publications were translated into Russian and thrown into our environment through our social networking sites, Telegram channels and foreign agent media," Borisov reported.
Elections to the 8th Russian State Duma (lower house) were held over a period of three days - on September 17, 18 and 19. After processing 100% of the voting results, the nation’s ruling party, United Russia, clinched 49.82% of the ballots on the party list to the Russian State Duma, according to the Central Election Commission’s website. The Communist Party came in second (18.93%), while the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia reaped 7.55%, A Just Russia — For Truth gained 7.46% and New People got 5.32%. All these five parties broke through the 5% barrier to enter the State Duma.