Ukrainian parliamentary election interference (2014)
| Date | October 2014 shortly before the Ukrainian parliamentary elections were held. |
|---|---|
| Suspected Actor | A pro-Russian hacktivist group called 'Cyberberkut' with suspected ties to the GRU hacker group known as APT28 (or Fancy Bear) was allegedly responsible for the attacks.[1] |
| Target and Method | The website of the Ukrainian Central Election Commission, which organized the elections, was shut down. Ukrainian security officials characterized the operation as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which can slow down or disable a network by flooding it with communications requests.[2] |
| Purpose | The Central Election Commission described the attack as "just one component in an information war being conducted against our state". [3] The attack can be seen as part of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which had started with the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia in February-March 2014.[4] |
| Result | Ukrainian officials announced that they were prepared for this case and used a backup to restore the entire system.[5] |
| Aftermath | In 2015, Ukraine was subject to another cyber operation conducted against the Ukrainian power grid.
In 2018, Ukrainian officials noted that they were planning to upgrade their information technology infrastructure prior to the 2019 presidential election in order to address a range of cyber security threats that they had expected to face.[6] |
| Analysed in | Scenario 01: Election interference |
- ↑ A Greenberg, 'Everything We Know About Russia's Election-Hacking Playbook' Wired (6 September 2017).
- ↑ M Clayton, 'Ukraine election narrowly avoided "wanton destruction" from hackers' CS Monitor (17 June 2014).
- ↑ 'Hackers target Ukraine's election website' AFP (25 October 2014).
- ↑ See, eg, 'International armed conflict in Ukraine' Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts (12 September 2017).
- ↑ 'Hackers target Ukraine's election website' AFP (25 October 2014).
- ↑ OSCE, 'Ukraine: Presidential Election 31 March 2019 - ODIHR Needs Assessment Mission Report' (21 December 2018) 7.