KIEV: Hackers attacked Ukraine’s election commission website on Saturday on the eve of parliamentary polls, officials said, but they denied Russian reports that the vote counting system itself had been put out of action. The site, run by the commission in charge of organising Sunday’s election, briefly shut down.

Ukrainian security officials blamed a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a method that can slow down or disable a network by flooding it with communications requests. “There is a DDoS attack on the commission’s site,” the government information security service said on its Facebook page.

The security service said the attack was “predictable” and that measures had been prepared in advance to ensure that the election site could not be completely taken down. “If a site runs slowly, that doesn’t mean it has been destroyed by hackers,” the statement said.

A report on Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti quoted a statement on the personal website of the Ukrainian prosecutor general saying that the electronic vote counting system was out of order and that Sunday’s ballots would have to be counted by hand.

The commission spokesman, Kostyantyn Khivrenko, called the RIA Novosti report a “fake”.

“The Central Election Commission will issue preliminary results of the voting with the help of the Vybory information-analytical system. This system is working normally,” he said.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the country’s lead internal security agency, said that “the physical protection of the central server and its regional components has been ensured”.

“Any statements regarding the alleged successful unauthorised intrusions into the cyber space of the Central Election Commi­ssion or the elements of the elections systems do not correspond to the facts.

Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2014