On the day of Romania’s presidential election re-run, several government websites were hit by a cyberattack believed to be carried out by Russian-linked hackers, according to reports.
The attackers claimed responsibility via a post on their Telegram channel, listing the websites of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Justice among their targets. Romanian television station Digi24 reported that the cyberattack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault, which works by flooding the targeted servers with massive volumes of internet traffic, disrupting normal operation.
Romania’s Cybersecurity Directorate did not immediately respond to inquiries for more details. However, it later confirmed in a Facebook post that all the affected websites were ‘operational as of 2 p.m. local time’ and signed off with a nod to pop culture: “May the Force be with you.”
This attack coincided with a politically sensitive moment in Romania — a repeat of last year’s presidential election. That initial vote was invalidated by the country’s highest court following allegations of illegal campaigning and suspected Russian interference favoring Călin Georgescu, a relatively unknown ultranationalist candidate.
According to declassified Romanian intelligence documents, more than 85,000 cyberattacks targeted the country’s electoral IT infrastructure on and after last November’s election day.
Leave a Reply