WTF?! Romania’s constitutional court has thrown out the results of the first round of the presidential election amid evidence of possible Russian meddling through cyberattacks. There was also evidence of an insidious social media influence campaign.
It’s been a wild ride for democracy in Romania lately. A declassified report from the country’s Intelligence Service reveals that this year’s presidential elections were targeted by over 85,000 cyberattacks originating from 33 nations on November 19.
The agency said the hackers accessed Romania’s central election infrastructure to alter information and deny system access. The bad actors used various vectors, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting on voter registration websites.
The hackers also leaked account credentials for these sites on a shady Russian hacker forum less than a week before the first round of voting. The Intelligence Service believes the attacks were state-sponsored due to the massive scale and resources involved.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. A separate declassified Romanian intel report states that officials uncovered evidence of a coordinated Russian influence campaign on TikTok. The effort favored Romanian presidential long-shot Calin Georgescu.
The report says over 100 Romanian TikTok influencers with a combined 8 million followers were paid to post pro-Georgescu content using specified hashtags. The campaign got seriously amplified around November 13, with Georgescu’s videos cracking the top 10 trending by November 26. Some of the suspected TikTok accounts used for the campaign were years old but had been largely inactive until mid-November, when they suddenly kicked into high gear promoting Georgescu.
The Intelligence Service connected the dots back to Russia, noting textual overlaps between the Georgescu messaging and a similar Russian-backed campaign in Moldova. Bleeping Computer notes that investigators believe Russia views Romania as a strategic adversary because of its NATO ties. However, they didn’t explicitly name the country as the perpetrator of the attacks.
With all this weighing on the election’s legitimacy, Romania’s top constitutional court decided to scrap the results entirely and call for a re-run. It’s a pragmatic move but could shake public confidence in the electoral process.
Image credit: Sasha Pleshco