Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/romanias-election-systems-targeted-in-over-85-000-cyberattacks/

by stefanv • 2 years ago

83 44 2 years ago

bleepingcomputer.com

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Actual article: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/romanias-elec...

Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42339819

Russia and China rigged Romanian Elections using 10M fake TikTok accounts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334325

stefanv2• 2 years ago

The underlaying news is the same, but my link focuses more on the technical reason (IT system breach), while the link you posted emphasizes the political reasons

postepowanieadm• 2 years ago

Ok, but if IT systems were breached then a simple recount should do.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Fine, updated,

Actual article:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/romanias-elec...

trlpanv• 2 years ago

Gosh, how about reverting to pen and paper? This is a solved problem, people have been saying this since the first introduction of voting machines.

I think there is even an XKCD about this.

ropejumper3• 2 years ago

No voting machines were used. It was paper ballots with stamps.

cool_dude853• 2 years ago

Is there any English reporting of the concrete nature of these cyberattacks? The report linked in the article is obviously in Romanian, but I am very curious if the report has specific allegations about e.g. phony votes, hacked results, etc. or if it comes down to "there was a facebook group that reposted the guy's tiktoks"?

talldayo2• 2 years ago

This is a little bit of background: https://kyivinsider.com/russia-and-china-just-rigged-romania...

cool_dude853• 2 years ago

This is weak stuff - the allegation here seems to be that Georgescu bought fake followers on tiktok.

stefanv2• 2 years ago

I could not find any official English translation of the report, but Romanian can be easily translated with online tools. This link (found in the article) seems to have more technical details https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/romanias-elec...

“The Romanian intelligence agency says that the 85,000 attacks continued until November 25th, the night after the first presidential election round, and the goals ranged from gaining access to the election infrastructure and compromising it to altering election information for the public and denying access to the systems.

SRI notes in the declassified report that the threat actor tried to breach the systems by exploiting SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities from devices in more than 33 countries.

The agency is also warning that Romania's election infrastructure is still affected by vulnerabilities that could be exploited to move laterally on the network and establish persistence.”

cool_dude853• 2 years ago

So, they can't even get the Romanian Intelligence Service to make a specific claim that some aspect of voting was affected, instead that they were "targeted by" cyberattacks? And this is enough to cancel already-held elections?

redleader55• 2 years ago

This is a very bad article as the cyberattacks did nothing and didn't interfere with the election.

The relevant part here is how TikTok was used to push an unknown character from a nobody to getting 22% of the votes in the first round, all while no one was aware of this. The polls didn't show him among the favorites. More than that the campaign was so we'll targeted that only people likely to vote for him saw the TikTok content making everyone else completely unaware of his presence.

cryptoegorophy• 2 years ago

How is this a cyberattack? If it doesn’t fit the narrative then it is a cyber attack?

willvarfar• 2 years ago

It is a cyber attack if the popularity is not organic, but rather manipulated by state actors?

cbg0• 2 years ago

There were DDoS attacks targeting some state systems connected to the electoral process, that is factually correct, but it's not why the election was cancelled, that's because a candidate broke electoral law.

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

It's the new buzzword for any technological mishap.

throw_pm23• 2 years ago

He declared 0 campaign budget and he ran a campaign estimated at millions of $ in the last days before the election. Also the videos were not marked as campaign ads. These are illegal under Romanian law. The court took a courageous decision.

ChumpGPT2• 2 years ago

TikTok needs to be banned. It is a tool the Chinese are using very effectively and when paired with Russian efforts to undermine Western Democracies, it is creating mayhem in the systems we have grown to trust. There is an all-out war on the EU in an attempt to destroy the Union and drive out American relationships for China and Russia to take over quietly. Brussels is sleeping while the nightmare continues....

ethbr13• 2 years ago

By that metric, all social media should be subject to transparency et al. regulation.

Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft's algorithms have similar reach.

The real issue here is that afaik no country ever figured out a good way to regulation election speech in a democracy, past social norms and economic realities.

logicchains• 2 years ago

The reason people are voting for anti-EU candidates is that the "systems" have proving themselves completely untrustworthy. Western European liberal democracies have completely stopped delivering on the promise of increasing prosperity and instead resorted to clamping down and trying to censor anyone who criticises their failed economic and migration policies.

properpopper• 2 years ago

TikTok needs to be banned.

It won't achieve anything. The issue is not about China/Russia/America or mobile apps it's about media and media control.

Even your comment is filled with a negative narrative - Western Democracies VS our enemies ( China, Russia, etc ... ).

drive out American relationships for China and Russia to take over quietly

Is it bad for a union to have multiple relationships or multiple vectors of development?

it is creating mayhem in the systems we have grown to trust

I don't see it, but if something can cause a mayhem in the systems this means that these systems are flawed?

para_parolu• 2 years ago

TikTok doesn’t vote. People vote.

VladStanimir2• 2 years ago

The cyber attack was done against the institutions responsible for counting, collating and validating the election results.

While we use paper ballots and stamps for the actual voting and hand count every vote, transmiting and centralizing the results is done using IT infrastructure.

The cyber attack and the TikTok manipulation are 2 separate but related things.

NVHacker4• 2 years ago

They recounted the votes and found no difference. Someone uses big words (like cyber attack) to create fear and justify their actions.

NVHacker4• 2 years ago

He is well known, including in government circles, and was previously proposed for the prime minister role:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C4%83lin_Georgescu Rather weird to claim that his over 2 million voters across the country and diaspora were because of TikTok.

dang• 2 years ago

I've merged most of the comments into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42339819, which is currently on the front page (but left the ones that only make sense in this context).

For the current post, we changed the URL above from https://www.techradar.com/pro/romania-cancels-election-after... to the article it points to.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks

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