Russia reports massive cyberattacks on its remote voting system

Moscow, March 17 (IANS) Russian election authorities have said that about 160,000 cyberattacks on the country's remote electronic voting resources were blocked.

The attacks were mainly directed toward the voting portal, with 30,000 attacks launched against the monitoring portal for the remote electronic voting system, Ella Pamfilova, head of the Russian Central Election Commission, was quoted as saying on Saturday by Xinhua news agency.

Pamfilova noted that the cyberattack activity increased significantly on Saturday from Friday and ended in failure.

Vadim Kovalev, head of the Public Headquarters for Election Observation in Moscow, said Saturday that cyberattacks on Moscow's information systems were traced to the US and the UK.

"We see that most of the servers where the attacks come from are located in the US and the UK, at least it is the way they are detected," Kovalev said.

The voting for Russia's eighth presidential election started on March 15 and will conclude on March 17. Remote electronic voting is introduced to parts of the country for the first time.