Russian hackers target Romania’s election day

A hacker group attacked several Romanian government and presidential candidates on the morning of the country’s national elections.

The group known as DDOSIA/NoName057, claimed authorship of the attack on their own Telegram channel, and admitted the usage of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) method, which makes websites inaccessible by flooding their servers with unmanageable amounts of traffic. The same group has previously claimed attacks against institutions in Poland, Lithuania, Italy and other EU countries seen as critical of Russia.

Among the websites affected by the attack, Romanian news outlet G4media reports that the website of the Romanian Constitutional Court, the main government portal, the Romanian foreign ministry site and the websites of four presidential candidates were completely down for multiple hours. The Cybersecurity Directorate later stated that all websites the hacker group listed as victims were back online as of 2pm local time.

According to cybersecurity researcher Cyberoo, DDOSIA/NoName057 is a pro-Russia hacktivist organisation which primarily targets countries that have expressed criticism towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and was originally initiated on Telegram in early 2022.

This attack took place on the day that Romanians are heading to the polls for a re-run of the first round of the presidential election. The vote, which follows November’s cancelled election for suspected illegal campaigning, will see Romanians deciding between George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians party, and Crin Antonescu, endorsed by ruling centre-left Social Democrats as well as the centre-right National Liberals and the Hungarian minority party.

Notably, while Crin Antonescu and other relevant names on the first round ballot were affected by this cyberattack, George Simion’s website was not targeted. Romanian media has categorized Simion’s platform as pro-Russia due to his criticism of NATO and to his self-proclaimed “Trumpian” style campaign.