MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) - Ukrainian authorities suspect a hacker attack to be behind the earlier announcement about the crippled electronic election system that was posted Saturday on the Prosecutor General's official webpage, his deputy Susanna Savchuk told RIA Novosi.
"This message is not true. The website has been tampered with. We are currently looking into this [incident]," Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema's deputy said.
When asked if the website had been hacked into, she replied: "I think that is right."
Earlier in the day, a statement published on Vitaly Yarema's official website said that votes in the Sunday parliamentary election would be counted manually due to a breakdown in the electronic system "Elections" and in the Central Election Commission (CEC) website. The CEC denied this report saying the vote counting system was working as usual.
On Saturday, Ukraine's Service for Special Communication and Information Protection said on Facebook that CEC's webpage had been targeted for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. It vowed to keep the webpage running throughout the elections period by having secondary resources that are a mirror of the main page.
The early parliamentary elections in Ukraine will take place on October 26. Ukrainians will vote for the parliament's 424 members — 225 of them are to be elected by party lists with the election threshold set at five percent, and 199 by single-seat constituencies.
On Thursday head of the Kremlin staff, Sergei Ivanov said that Russia will recognize the parliamentary elections in Ukraine.
