Russians hacked into Ukraine's nationwide university entrance test

Russian hackers carried out attacks on the network and on students’ computers during the NMT-2023 in Ukraine. (NMT is the national multi-subject test, a form of examination that has temporarily replaced the traditional external independent assessments since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion – ed.)

This was reported by Tetiana Vakulenko, director of the Ukrainian Centre for Educational Quality Assessment (UCEQA), in an interview with the New Ukrainian School.

Vakulenko noted that entrants’ complaints about technical problems during the test are justified.

"We faced a large number of hacker attacks, most of which came from Russia. The hackers tried to overload our testing system, so it kept freezing," Vakulenko explained.

Vakulenko said the system had been set up to accommodate up to 15,000 entrants per session.

But some days, the home page received more than 140,000 simultaneous requests.

"In this way, the hackers tried to overload our server with numerous requests. So there were entrants who had difficulty logging in and saving their results," she adds.

The UCEQA director noted that in cases where their computers had frozen, the students were given extra time to complete their tasks.

In critical cases, they were allowed to sit the multi-subject test in an additional session.

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