Russia’s parliamentary elections have seen foreign interference, Russia’s Central Election Commission said on Saturday.
In Russia, elections to the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, are taking place from Friday to Sunday, and no one doubts that the ruling United Russia party will win them once again.
In several regions of Russia, voters can cast their votes electronically for the first time in parliamentary elections.
The Central Election Commission said it had identified three cyber-attacks on the commission’s resources and that these attacks had come from abroad.
“Yesterday we registered three targeted attacks from abroad,” said Alexander Sokolchuk, head of the commission’s information center.
He found that two cyber-attacks were directed against the commission’s website, and one was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Sokolchuk said the attacks had been quite strong and added that more were to come. He did not reveal from which countries the attacks came.
Following a crackdown on the Kremlin’s opposition campaign, which left President Vladimir Putin’s most active opponents behind bars or forced to flee the country, but denied the candidacy of most others with various reservations, the United Russia election is expected to win once again .
In the first two days of the elections, Russian social media has been flooded with news of possible irregularities in the electoral process.-
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