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Hackers Target Ukraine’s Election Website

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 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.

“There is a DDoS attack on the commission’s site,” the government information security service said on its Facebook page.

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.

“If a site runs slowly, that doesn’t mean it has been destroyed by hackers,” the statement said.

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 and that Sunday’s
ballots would have to be counted by hand.

The commission spokesman, Kostyantyn Khivrenko, called the RIA Novosti report a “fake”.

“The
Central Election Commission will issue preliminary results of the
voting with the help of the Vybory information-analytical system. This
system is working normally,” he said.

The Ukrainian Security
Service (SBU), the country’s lead internal security agency, said that
“the physical protection of the central server and its regional
components has been ensured”.

“Any statements regarding the
alleged successful unauthorised intrusions into the cyber space of the
Central Election Commission or the elements of the elections systems do
not correspond to the facts. Hackers are controlling nothing,” Markiyan
Lubkivskyy, an adviser to the SBU chief, said.

An SBU spokeswoman
told AFP that attacks on the election commission’s site began a week
ago, “but so far we have dealt with them”.

Outdoor video screens hacked?
The
cyber troubles came as Ukraine prepared for an election overshadowed by
a bloody pro-Russian insurgency in the country’s east and the
annexation by Russia of the Crimean province in the south.

Pro-Western and nationalist parties are expected to dominate the new parliament.

In
another possible sign of cyber tensions, the Ukrainska Pravda news
website on Friday reported that outdoor video screens across Kyiv were
briefly hacked.

The screens, which are used for advertising,
including pre-election political ads, reportedly started to display
“scary and horrible images,” the report said.

Engineers went out “to physically unplug” the screens, according to the report.

The
report could not be confirmed, but footage on YouTube purporting to
capture the incident showed a street screen abruptly switching to
footage of destroyed buildings and dead bodies, as well as the images of
two nationalist politicians running for parliament, with the words “war
criminals”.