Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications

"Information services", the company that maintains and administers the site of the Central Election Commission (CEC) and is responsible for computer processing of the results of the 2015 local elections and national referendum, registered an unprecedented for Bulgaria hacker attack against the public infrastructure of the CEC. This happened shortly after the beginning of the election day. Later in the day it became clear that such an attack was organized against public websites of other state organizations key for the election process.

From the onset of the attack of the type "denial of service" (DDoS), over 530,000,000 (five hundred and thirty million / over half a billion) requests were made on Internet portal of CEC within 10 hours, as a quarter of them are IP addresses originating in Vietnam, Turkey and the United States. At the beginning of the attack over 65 million (sixty-five million) concurrent user sessions were recorded on CEC webpage, which is tantamount to 65 million users trying to access a website at the same time.

For comparison:

• the regular traffic on the website of CEC during the previous elections was around 1.8 million (one million eight hundred thousand) requests within a month, which is 275 times less than today’s requests for 10 hours.

• In 2013, when a similar attack was reported a total of 12 million requests were registered in a month, which is about 44 times less than today’s requests registered in 10 hours.

Distributed attacks of this kind are carried out by remote control of millions of computers that have been previously infected with malware, which can be activated simultaneously and directs requests to selected targets. The global trend in recent years is to increase the number and intensity of these attacks, which requires the implementation of specific protective devices that allow distinction between legitimate and illegitimate requests to public websites.

This is the reason why the company has ensured in advance the most effective and modern infrastructure protection from such attacks deploying technology and software used by institutions such as the White House, for example.

Attack of this scale and with such duration as today’s, however, have are precedent to Bulgaria and handling them without blocking legitimate requests from users, is a serious challenge that was met by the teams of "Information Services" JSC together with specialists and leading IT security services experts. The proactive joint action that were taken to suppress the attack and restore the normal operation of the Internet page of CEC yielded results and around noon today CEC’s website began to function normally with some temporary delays.

DDoS attack continues to the present moment, but due to the professional efforts of the staff, IT infrastructure of the company accepts and services all requests for access to the website of the Commission, yet at the peak loads there may be delays.

We use this opportunity to emphasize that the infrastructure performing computer processing of the results is completely physically isolated from the Internet. All actions against the public infrastructure of the Company do not and can not have an impact on the processing of election protocols in the 265 municipalities in Bulgaria and in the central calculation center at CEC.