You're reading: Parallel vote count in jeopardy because of hacker attacks

The parallel vote count by Ukraine's largest civic network OPORA will be delayed because of a series of orchestrated hacker and orchestrated denial-of-service attacks it has been experiencing since the voting day, Oct. 28.

OPORA
deployed 3,500 watchers across the nation, and was supposed to do a parallel
vote count at 1,000 precinct commissions. Established in 2004, OPORA remains
the biggest domestic election monitoring group.

OPORA’s
coordinator Olha Aivazovska said the denial-of-service, or DOS attacks, started
at 2 p.m. on Election Day, which subsequently forced the organization’s main
and regional websites to crash.  DOS
attacks are orchestrated attempts to interrupt or suspend the work of
particular servers through the Internet. They are usually conducted by a person
or a group of people.

Aivazovska said more than 2,000 computers were taking part in the attack. But OPORA was
not the only network experiencing such problems. Several opposition figures
also reported  DDOS attacks on their
websites on Oct. 28.

The
websites of the United Opposition member Arseniy Yatseniuk and jailed former Prime
Minister Yulia Tymoshenko were attacked on Election Day, as well as the website
of Anatoliy Hrytsenko, former defense minister and Civic Position party leader.

OPORA was
scheduled to announce the results of its parallel vote count, which was to
include full coverage in 10 election districts and nationwide voter turnout at
9:30 a.m. today. But by mid-day, the group told the Kyiv Post that it was still
recovering information from its online sources that were hacked.

Altogether,
Aivazovska said, nine OPORA websites and its online map of election violations
were rendered temporarily inoperable. “It is an organized attack,” says
Aivazovska. Those kinds of things do not happen off-the-cuff. It’s dog cheap
but made by professionals.”

OPORA’s
websites were hacked from servers in China, Mongolia and South Korea, according
to the group’s preliminary findings.  “As
for now 30 percent of information is still to be recovered. Hopefully, we’ll be
ready to report (on the parallel vote count results) by the end of the day,”
Aivazovska said.

A parallel
vote count is an important leverage of control in a tense and non-transparent
election like Ukraine’s. A poll commissioned by Democratic Initiatives and
financed by the Dutch Embassy in early October found that only 9 percent think
the election would be completely free and fair, while 47 percent said it will
be not at all or not very free and fair.

Another
poll commissioned by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems
conducted in late September found that only 14 percent of Ukrainians said that
the parliamentary elections would be completely free and fair. 

Kyiv Post
staff writer Anastasia Forina can be reached at [email protected]