Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks

[dang]

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

[ChrisArchitect]

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

Related:

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

[stefanv]

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

[cool_dude85]

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"?

[stefanv]

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.”

[talldayo]

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

[redleader55]

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]

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

[VladStanimir]

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.

[NVHacker]

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.

[ChumpGPT]

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....

[trlpanv]

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.

[ropejumper]

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