Material updated 15.03. 2024 at 23:35
On the first day of voting in the Russian presidential election, the Moscow e-voting system (DEG) faced massive cyberattacks. All of them have been repelled, and the data of Muscovites has not been lost or compromised.
The attacks did not affect the course of voting: at the moment [13:00 Moscow time, – ed. note] more than 1.2 million voters have already made their choice electronically. All votes have been delivered to the blockchain, none of them have been lost or compromised.
We emphasize that most of the IP addresses from which anomalous traffic is recorded are foreign. Moreover, judging by the scale, these are well-prepared, professional attacks, the purpose of which is not just to create temporary difficulties, but to completely disrupt the voting, depriving residents of their legal right to choose.
The federal e-voting platform for the remaining twenty-eight regions of Russia is working normally, no major attacks on it have been reported yet, but the load on it is high. According to the Ministry of Digital Development, 1.6 million people voted using e-voting in 13 hours. This is 35% of users registered on the platform.
Therefore, both the system and Gosuslugi, through which authorization for voting takes place, sometimes "freeze up".
Despite the high activity of voters, the remote electronic voting platform and Gosuslugi are coping with the load. Temporarily, for some users, logging into the systems could be slower than usual, on the vybory.gov.ru voting portal, some users saw a message that the system was under high load, and an offer to vote later. Currently, almost 6,000 users per second are being authorized on Gosuslugi at peak times.
Recall that voting in the presidential election in 2024 will last until 20:00 on March 17 local time.
However, a voter will be able to vote in the e-voting system only according to the time of the region in which he has permanent registration.
If you did not register in advance, you will only be able to vote offline, at your polling station.
Added:
According to the Central Election Commission of Russia, about 10.5 thousand attacks on e-voting resources have already been blocked since the beginning of voting.
The main attacks are on the voting portal itself – more than 10 thousand. They are also trying to get into the remote voting monitoring portal. The system is confidently coping with the attacks.
In addition, we have already experienced a serious DDoS attack on the service video surveillance portal, which led to short-term unavailability for some users. Prompt decisions were made, the attack was neutralized, the availability of the broadcast is now 100 percent, the recording of broadcast archives is being carried out as usual.
E-voting in different regions is proceeding without major failures. As "The First Technical" was told in Cheboksary, it was easy to vote through the federal system in the city.
The voting went well, it was quite simple. It took me 5 minutes, as it slowed down a little, but only a little.
In St. Petersburg, one of the leading cities in terms of the number of applications for participation in e-voting, the system had a harder time. But closer to the end of the working day, voters were able to vote more calmly.
We voted through e-voting with my husband, we poked around during the day — the site was overloaded. We voted a few hours later. No problems, nothing was slowing down anymore.
In general, 2/3 of e-voting participants have already made their choice on the federal platform during the first incomplete day of voting. The Ministry of Digital Development notes that this was done by more than 3 million people. This is 65% of those who applied on Gosuslugi and were included in the e-voting voter list.
