Hackers in California attacked several of the Russian government’s websites over the weekend, Russian officials said on Monday, just as the country was trying to conduct elections.
“Someone attempted to hack our website and alter the data there, making 50,000 requests per minute,” said Vladimir Churov, chairman of the Central Election Commission of Russia, according to a report in the state-funded Russia Today. Such an attack is known as a distributed denial of service, which is designed to crash a website.
Churov blamed an actor in the United States. “They failed and we have already established the culprit,” Churov said. “It’s a company based in San Francisco.”
Officials acknowledged a simultaneous attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official website. “On Sunday, a very powerful hacking attack was made,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian media. “Defense systems worked though it was not easy, the attack was rather strong.”
Russians voted Monday to elect 21 governors and 11 regional parliaments. However, the country’s opposition party, Parnas, was permitted to compete in only one region.
The country has been cultivating some of the world’s most proficient hackers and advanced cyber infrastructure in recent years. The U.S. has also fallen victim to Russian cyberattacks; in August, it was reported that Russian hackers penetrated email servers belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
