(originally published 10/28/2014)
As Ukraine prepared to enter into its first elections since the Crimean crisis over the weekend, hackers launched a DDoS attack against the website run by the Ukrainian election commission.
The attack was apparently intended to disrupt the election process, by undermining the public’s trust in the government, not so much to disrupt the actual voting itself. Ukraine’s voting system uses electronic voting boots, but those booths don’t use the internet to send results, and indeed the voting system itself isn’t connected to the internet. What the hackers were trying to interrupt was the reporting of the results, and to undermine confidence in the system as a whole.
In addition to the election commission website, hackers may have hacked the website of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, and posting a message that stated that the election infrastructure had been crippled, and that votes would have to be counted by hand. According to his deputy, the posting was not true, and hadn’t been posted by their office.
The Ukranian government stated that they had anticipated this kid of attack – which, quite frankly, wouldn’t have been that hard to anticipate – and had taken measures to protect the site’s availability ‘by having secondary resources that are a mirror of the main page’. This sounds like they used a content distribution network similar to Akamai or Limelight to spread copies across a distributed network of servers, making it very difficult to completely disrupt.
The elections themselves were called by the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, in order to elect a new parliament. Poroshenko had been under pressure to do so, because of the large number of parliament members who still proclaimed loyalty to Russia, and were disruptive influence in Ukranian politics.
The attacks appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as exit polls have increasingly shown support for Poroshenko’s government.
Additionally, hackers may have also compromised outdoor video screens around Ukraine, causing them to display violent and graphic images of dead bodies and destroyed buildings, apparently as part of some kind of intimidation or threat. Engineers had to power down the screens to stop the images, as they were apparently unable to access them electronically.
