Websites of Bulgaria’s Parliament, revenue agency, security agency offline in apparent hacker attacks
The websites of Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security, Parliament, National Revenue Agency and the state energy regulator were offline on the afternoon of November 1 in what was seen as hacker attackers on the day that the country was holding second-round mayoral elections in many cities and towns.
The website of the Central Election Commission also was the target of a reported attack on the morning of November 1, slowing it down. A week earlier, when the first round of municipal elections were held simultaneously with a referendum on online voting, the commission’s website was brought down by a hacker attack.
On October 30, President Rossen Plevneliev said that he had asked the State Agency for National Security to investigate the attack on the commission’s website on the day of the referendum and municipal elections. A keen advocate of electoral reform referendums, the October 25 ballot on whether to permit electronic voting was the result of an initiative by Plevneliev.
Plevneliev said that attack on the commission’s website could have been intended to discredit the idea of online voting.
Two hours after he told reporters about his request to SANS to investigate the downing of the CEC website, the official website of the Bulgarian Presidency was crashed by a denial-of-service attack.
