Ukraine carries out a large-scale attack on Russian CEC for holding illegal elections in occupied areas of Ukraine – sources
Due to the illegal elections in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, cyber specialists of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) carried out a large-scale attack on the resources of the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) on the so-called "single voting day" on September 14, 2025.
As a source in Ukrainian intelligence told the Interfax-Ukraine agency, the purpose of the cyber attack was to prevent online voting in the Russian elections, which the occupation authorities are conducting, including in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
The powerful DDOS attack was directed at digital resources involved in the illegal elections:
- servers of the Central Election Commission (CEC) and the remote electronic voting platform (DEG), which were used during online voting in the elections of city mayors and governors in the territory of the Russian Federation;
- backbone routers of Rostelecom;
- servers of the state portal of digital services of the Russian Federation "Gosuslugi".
As a result of the attack, the work of digital services that conducted online voting was paralyzed for some time, and many Russians were unable to vote in the elections of mayors and governors in the regions of the Russian Federation.
The problems with the work of remote voting services were also confirmed by Roskomnadzor. According to them, "due to failures in the Rostelecom network, traffic on the backbone network was degraded."