A hacker attack aiming to disrupt the blockchain-based voting system for the currently ongoing constitutional referendum in the Russian Federation has failed. This has been reported by the head of the territorial administration improvement department in the government of Moscow Artem Kostyrko, cited by Russian information agency TASS.
The intrusion was directed on an observation node on the blockchain, but the work of the system has not been compromised, Kostyrko noted.
“As of right now, an increased security mode has been introduced. There has been no disruption in the voting process, all votes are stored in the guaranteed delivery service, meaning they have been recorded on the blockchain. After the information security specialist conducts the necessary operations, the access to the observation node will be resumed”, Kostyrko said.
The report doesn’t provide information on how far the intrusion went, what specific goals it was aimed at nor where it came from.
On May 23, in the context of the COVID-19 developments in the country, the president of Russia Vladimir Putin signed a law regulating online voting at a federal level. The new law states that the voters’ signatures may be collected through a single portal of state and local services.
In a week-long poll that started on June 25 Russians will have to decide on a number of constitutional reforms – most notably the issue of rebooting the presidential terms served by the running president Vladimir Putin.
The latest hacker attack targeted the votes of Moscow, where around 1 million people registered for online voting, and Nizhny Novgorod, with an additional 140 thousand online voters, as reported by TASS.
As it became evident in early June, the online voting mechanism used by the Russian authorities is most likely developed by Kaspersky Lab founded on open-source technology from blockchain services firm Bitfury.
