A hacker attempted to tamper with the blockchain voting system used in recent votes to decide constitutional changes in the Russian Federation. Security measures worked and the voting system was not affected.
Node promptly taken offline and guaranteed security
According to the Russian news agency TASS, the head of the IT Technology Department of the Moscow government Artem Kostyrko said that an observation node on the blockchain was targeted during the last votes, but the system was in no way compromise.
From the report it is not clear what the hacker managed to get into the attack and how far he managed to penetrate. Immediately after the attack, Kostyrko said, “At the moment, an increased security mode has been introduced.
There was no break in the vote, all the votes are in the guaranteed delivery service, that is, they will be registered on the blockchain ". The website that supported voting also went down on the first day of electronic voting due to an overload, said the Central Electoral Commission.
Kostyrko said the node was secured and offline even though IT experts had ensured that it could be safely turned on again. According to the head of the electoral observers movement of Russia, Golos Grigory Melkonyants, independent observers could not connect to the blockchain, and therefore the problem could not concern one of these observer nodes for monitoring the process.
No direct participation for independent observers
The vote took place on the servers of the Information Technology Department of the city of Moscow. "We suggested that the system be at least distributed among the district polling stations, but it was not accepted," said Melkonyants.
Throughout the process, observers were only able to look at the website and download the CSV files with encrypted marks every 30 minutes. The Department of Information Technology said that more time is needed to gather information and prepare a response.
During the survey, the Russians expressed themselves on the issue of constitutional changes, among which the most important is whether to allow the president of the country - currently Vladimir Putin - to remain in power for more than the current limit of two consecutive six-year terms, according to the article of the TASS.
According to the TASS report, the vote started on June 25th and ended on Tuesday June 30th. About 1 million applications to use the blockchain system for voting have been registered in Moscow and up to 140.000 by Nizhny Novgorod.
The voting system appears to be provided by Karpersky Lab based on the open source technology of the blockchain service company Bitfury. In short, hackers are always at work. How do you protect your bitcoins? you can buy Bitcoins in many different ways, did you know?
