Cyberattack. Pixabay
As reported by the online media Suspilne.
On September 14, 2025, during the so-called single voting day on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, the GUR cyber specialists conducted a large-scale operation against the resources of the Russian Central Election Commission. The main objective of the action was to seize control over online voting in the Russian Federation, which was being conducted on the occupied Ukrainian territories as well.
According to the GUR of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the attack targeted critically important digital components: the Central Election Commission’s servers and the remote electronic voting platform used during elections for mayors and governors in Russia; Rostelecom’s backbone routers and the servers of the Gosuslugi government services portal were also compromised. Such actions were intended to significantly affect the availability of online voting services.
As a result of the attack, online resources were disrupted for a period, making it impossible for many citizens to vote. In the CEC building, the internet infrastructure stopped – a phenomenon that confirmed the seriousness of the damage to digital voting management services.
In the CEC building, the internet is lagging – an attack is underway
Problems with the network were also registered by Roskomnadzor. According to the regulator, outages in Rostelecom’s network caused degradation of traffic on the backbone network, complicating or delaying access to online voting services.
Due to outages in Rostelecom’s network, there was degradation of traffic on the backbone network
Such events underscore the growing role of cyber threats in modern electoral processes and the vulnerability of digital services that support voting in crisis regions. The incident provides a new impulse to strengthen the cybersecurity of electoral infrastructures and to develop more robust backup mechanisms for access to voting under threat conditions.
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