Russia, the country led by President Vladimir Putin has alleged that two nations from the west have launched cyber attacks on its Presidential Elections in March 2018 to influence the election results.
In what seems to be direct blame on the United States and Dan Coats, the UK intelligence officer, Nikolai Murashov, the deputy director of the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents, Moscow accused the nations residing in the west for launching cyber attacks on critical infrastructure since June 2017.
Murshov says that the 1st serious cyberattack was launched on June 15th, 2017 when Russia decided to host a Q&A session. However, the attack consequences were nullified by the technical department which later decided not to disclose the incident to the public for reasons.
Disclosing the same at the National Information Security Forum, InfoForum-2019 the intelligence officer of Russia holding a top rank said in a polite tone that his nation knows on how to defend its digital assets against such attacks and can harshly retaliate to such instances.
Nikolai Murashov then disclosed to the world that a new wave of cyber attack with full intensity was launched on March 18, 2018- just before the day of the President Elections. It was aimed to disrupt video surveillance over the voting process across the country which could have then led to the influence of election results via black hat tactics. The cyber attack was reportedly caused by a botnet involving over 30K computers in 86 countries aimed at the election servers with 15K fake DNS queries per hour.
Murashov said that the intelligence forces managed to halt the attacks from over 50K sources over six months period and succeeded in tracking down the use of 30,000 domain names by perpetrators.
Later security experts analyzed around hundred samples & 3 malware modifications and notified the heads of 86 nations about the attack.
“We will not stay calm” were the final words said by the Nikolai Murashov at the conference.
Note- The National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents which works similar to NCSC of UK was set up in Sept’18 by the Russian Government based on the order of the Federal Security Service. The aim of this center is to detect, prevent and eliminate the attacks on Russian Information Sources.
