An elderly woman casts a ballot during a presidential election via a mobile election committee, who visit people who cannot physically attend a polling station, in Nikolayevka village outside Siberian city of Omsk, 2236 km east of Moscow, Russia, on March 16, 2024. (PHOTO / AP)

MOSCOW - Russian election authorities said Saturday that about 160,000 cyberattacks on the country's remote electronic voting resources were blocked.

The attacks were mainly directed toward the voting portal, with 30,000 attacks launched against the monitoring portal for the remote electronic voting system, said Ella Pamfilova, head of the Russian Central Election Commission.

Pamfilova noted that the cyberattack activity increased significantly on Saturday from Friday and ended in failures.

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Vadim Kovalev, head of the Public Headquarters for Election Observation in Moscow, said Saturday that cyberattacks on Moscow's information systems were traced to the United States and Britain.

"We see that most of the servers where the attacks come from are located in the US and the UK, at least it is the way they are detected," Kovalev said.

Russia's eighth presidential election is scheduled for March 15-17. Remote electronic voting is introduced to parts of the country for the first time.

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More than 114 million Russians are eligible to vote in the election. The Russian Central Election Committee said that more than 63 million voters had already gone to the polls by Saturday evening.

With Reuters inputs