Russian election sites hacked

Political websites in Russia are alleged to have been hacked during the country's parliamentary elections.

Among the victims have been radio stations, newspaper websites and election monitors, and there have been claims that some sites were hit with massive data requests in an attempt to force them offline.

Some have blamed the attacks on "criminals" and suggested the attackers are state-sponsored.

The weekend's elections will determine the lower house (Duma) of Russia for five years. Golos, a monitoring group which has been focusing on the elections, complained of "distributed denial of service attacks".

This type of attack involves bombarding a website with thousands upon thousands of data requests, which forces it offline.

Golos was at the time compiling a map of "election violations", which logged complaints of alleged irregularities in votes. It had managed to compile over 5,000 votes before it was forced offline.

Golos head Liliya Shibanova said "it's a big organisation with plenty of means that must have done it."