Hackers target Ukraine’s election website as cyberwar escalates

Hackers attacked Ukraine’s election commission website Saturday on the eve of parliamentary polls, officials said, but they denied Russian reports that the vote counting system itself had been put out of action. The www.cvk.gov.ua site, run by the commission in charge of organising Sunday’s election, briefly shut down. Ukrainian security officials blamed a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a method that can slow down or disable a network by flooding it with communications requests. The security service said the attack was “predictable” and that measures had been prepared in advance to ensure that the election site could not be completely taken down.

There is a DDoS attack on the commission’s site. If a site runs slowly, that doesn’t mean it has been destroyed by hackers.

Ukraine’s government information security service

Separately, a report on Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti quoted a statement on the personal website of the Ukrainian prosecutor general saying that the electronic vote counting system was out of order. According to this account, Sunday’s ballots would have to be counted by hand. Ukraine’s commission spokesman, Kostyantyn Khivrenko, called the RIA Novosti report a “fake”. The commission described the episode as “just one component in an information war being conducted against our state.” It said its computers were protected against any “unauthorised access by special services from developed countries or other countries of the world.”

Technology