Bulgarian authorities successfully defend Central Election Commission against massive cyber attack

Bulgarian authorities successfully defended the Central Election Commission (CEC) against an "unprecedented" cyber attack on Sunday, when the country held local elections and referendum on electronic voting, officials said.

The state-owned company "Information Services" (IS), which maintains and administers the website of the CEC and is responsible for computer processing of the results of the elections and referendum, shortly after the beginning of the election day registered "unprecedented for Bulgaria" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the public infrastructure of CEC, the company said on Sunday night on its website.

Since the beginning of the attack, over 530 million requests were made to the Internet portal of CEC within 10 hours, a quarter of them from IP addresses originating in Vietnam, Turkey and the U.S., IS said.

In 2013, when a similar attack was reflected, the authorities have registered a total of 12 million queries a month, IS said.

The normal traffic to the website of CEC during previous elections was about 1.8 million queries within a month, IS said.

The company solved the issue jointly with specialists and leading IT experts from the security services, IS said.

Bulgarians went to the polls on Sunday to cast ballots for local authorities and approve or reject the possibility of electronic voting in future elections and referendums, by answering the question: "Do you support the idea that people will have the right to vote from distance on-line when elections and referendums are held?" Endit