Russian authorities say they successfully repelled more than 3,000 waves of cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure during the country’s three-day State Duma parliamentary vote, which ran from September 18 through Sunday, September 20. Deputy Digital Development Minister Oleg Kachanov said roughly 2,000 attacks targeted the federal online voting platform and e-government systems, while the Central Election Commission (CEC) separately reported 135 waves against the federal remote voting portal, 420 against telecoms giant Rostelecom, and nearly 2,000 against broader e-government infrastructure. CEC Chair Ella Pamfilova attributed attacks to the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Brazil, and Mexico, though those claims were not independently verified. Despite the volume of reported attacks, Russian officials said no disruptions affected outcome integrity — though Moscow’s separate voting system did see electronic terminals briefly knocked offline on the first day, which officials attributed to a cyberattack.
The election was not without prior security questions. Last week, an anonymous group calling itself CikLeak claimed to have infiltrated systems belonging to Russia’s Central Election Commission and contractors involved in building Vybory, the state-run platform debuting this cycle. The group published screenshots it said showed access to internal documents, server configurations, and passwords. Russian officials largely dismissed those claims, and the CEC noted the election marked the first full use of Vybory 2.0 as the national vote-management system. More than 3.6 million people cast ballots electronically. The vote — the first State Duma election since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine — took place amid reported electoral irregularities and coincided with a large Ukrainian drone and missile strike near Moscow on the final day of voting. Final official results are expected by September 25.