Tensions between the United States and Russia are hitting close to home as organizers of a pivotal vote in Crimea make accusations that computer attacks interfering with their website originated from the University of Illinois.

The United States has opposed the results of a vote by the residents of Crimea, a peninsular republic of Ukraine, to secede from their nation and rejoin Russia. But the website that served to promote the vote, referendum2014.ru, was attacked in the early morning hours of Sunday, said organizers who allege the attack came from the Urbana campus. 

The Kremlin is claiming that the referendum has passed and that Russia will recognize Crimea as a nation independent of Ukraine. But given the “duress of Russian military intervention” in the region, Obama said in a statement the vote “would never be recognized by the United States or the international community.” 

University administrators discovered the allegations Monday morning, said campus spokeswoman Robin Kaler, as the news made its way stateside.

Kaler said that CITES would be looking into the issue further and had no further information at press time. 

The organizers of the referendum posted details of the attack on their website Sunday morning, saying that they identified the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the source of the attack.

“(It is from this place provided a large scanning of servers before the attack),” the organizers wrote as roughly translated from Russian.

According to the organizers, their site was hit by a DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service, which involves the concerted effort of a large number of computers, often infected with malware, trying to flood a website with traffic. 

When the number of requests to that server exceeds what it can return, users — legitimate or otherwise — are then unable to access the site. 

According to brief server logs released by the referendum organizers, three requests to their servers, made at 9:29 p.m. local time Saturday, originated from the Urbana campus.

Those logs show that the request associated with the University originated from an address in a range used specifically on the Urbana campus, rather than the entire University, and does not include the addresses used by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, according to records from CITES. 

The organizers also listed two University-related IP addresses that they said crawled the site shortly before the attack. The University did not have further information regarding where those IP addresses would have been accessed from at press time.

Nathaniel can be reached at [email protected] and @Nat_Lash.