Russia’s Central Election Commission says it’s under DDoS attack

The website of Russia’s Central Election Commission is experiencing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the commission reported on its Telegram channel.

Deputy Head of the Central Election Commission, Nikolai Bulayev, also confirmed that he had been informed of the attack, during a meeting at the commission’s information center for all-Russian voting.

“I received a message from somewhere, it has yet to be verified, that a DDoS attack is happening on our site, 240,000 requests per second, but we aren’t experiencing problems. [It may not] be going on at all, but the message came [saying] guys, beware,” Bulayeva told Interfax.

On the morning of June 25 — the first day of voting in Russia’s plebiscite on constitutional amendments — the independent television station Dozhd reported that the electronic voting portal for the Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod regions, 2020og.ru, stopped working. The site later came back online, claiming that it was not prepared to cope with heavy traffic.