MOSCOW, September 20. /TASS/. Artificial intelligence and rented computing power from the darknet are among tools used in attacks on Russia’s federal remote electronic voting (REV) system, though no disruptions were detected during the first two days of the vote, Oleg Artamonov, who chairs the territorial election commission for distance electronic voting, has told TASS.

"Of course, attacks are certainly taking place, but the capacity of our security system and the REV’s software and hardware suite itself significantly exceeds the power of the attacks. Therefore, they have no noticeable impact on the system’s availability to voters," said Artamonov.

Artamonov named two main types of attacks that the system has to counter: attempts to overload it with a large number of requests and vulnerability scanning. For the former, perpetrators employ substantial computing power rented on the black market and hosted across various countries.

This makes it impossible not only to identify the perpetrators but often even their citizenship, the official continued. Such attacks are repelled both by external security tools that block their sources in real time, and by a more than threefold capacity surplus of the REV hardware and software suite.

Vulnerability scanning, which earlier required high skills and lengthy training, has recently become easier due to AI technologies.

"However, as practice shows, a well-structured security system copes successfully in this case, too," Artamonov said.

The official added that no disruptions of the federal REV system were registered on the second day of the vote.