Invulnerable Russia – Kommersant

“United Russia” on Thursday reported on the results of the competition to hack the system of electronic voting in the intra-party primaries. The party itself turned out to be the winner: according to information from United Russia, the participants in the competition did not reveal any vulnerabilities. At the same time, party members claim that there were hacking attempts, not only from Russian, but also from German, Indonesian, Japanese and other IP addresses.

The results of the competition were summed up by the head of IT projects of United Russia (ER) Vyacheslav Sateev. Reports of recorded “holes” have not been received, the official quoted him as saying. Telegram channel EP.

Competition for hacking United Russia’s preliminary voting system announced a week earlier. They did not risk their main Internet resource, creating a copy for potential hackers at https://pg-test.er.ru/. 100 special electors registered on this site, whose votes and data were supposed to be manipulated by hackers. To win the competition, it was required to send evidence of the results of their work to the party mail. For a successful hack, either a demonstration of a table with a database of system users was counted, or a correct vote was saved in the blockchain, but given either without authorization, or on behalf of another person. United Russia even promised financial rewards for hacking the system, without specifying specific amounts, but in the end they did not have to resort to payments.

As Mr. Sateev explained, there were attempts to deceive the system: the test infrastructure was studied from 3.6 thousand fixed IP addresses.

“The geography of participants is wide: Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Finland, Singapore, USA, Brazil, Australia, Czech Republic,” the party member listed. According to him, the attackers tried to use methods such as SQL Injection (an attempt to inject malicious code into an SQL query on the database server), violation of the MIME types of uploaded files (in this case, the attacker uploads a file with the wrong MIME type to the server), scanning network infrastructure vulnerabilities and attempting a DDoS attack.

“The party’s infrastructure was not compromised, the attacks could not reveal the vulnerabilities of the electronic preliminary voting information system and the applied infrastructure solutions,” Sergey Perminov, Deputy Secretary of the United Russia General Council, confirmed to Kommersant the words of his colleague.

Recallthat in recent years, systems of remote electronic voting (DEV) are being increasingly introduced in Russia. So, in the Duma elections of 2021, it was available to voters in Moscow, Sevastopol, Kursk, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov and Yaroslavl regions. According to Ella Pamfilova, chairwoman of the Central Election Commission, in the future presidential campaign-2024, those regions that have already tested it in other elections will be able to resort to online voting. By 2024, the number of such subjects of the Russian Federation may exceed three dozen.

Representatives of opposition parties regularly express distrust of the results of the DEG and call for its abandonment. The authorities insist, first of all, on the convenience of such a voting format for voters, and in order to convince citizens of the security and safety of the system, they periodically resort to contests similar to the current one in United Russia. For example, at the initiative of the ex-head of the capital’s election observation headquarters, Alexei Venediktov (included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of foreign agents), such a competition for hackers with cash payments was held in Moscow three times: in 2019, the system was hacked by the French cryptographer Pierric Gaudry, in 2020 no one succeeded, and in 2021 the prize was divided between two hackers and members of the DEG technical working group.

United Russia this year hold their primaries almost entirely electronically. An exception, in particular, was made for new regions: in addition to electronic voting, there will be organized the usual one at 167 special polling stations, as well as an exit one.

However, the electronic system of preliminary intra-party voting traditionally attracts less public attention, since United Russia is determined only with its candidates in the upcoming elections. This year, the preliminary voting will take place from 22 to 28 May.

Andrey Vinokurov