from Hacker News

Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks

by stefanv on 12/6/24, 4:03 PM with 44 comments

  • by dang on 12/6/24, 5:21 PM

    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

  • by ChrisArchitect on 12/6/24, 4:12 PM

    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

  • by cool_dude85 on 12/6/24, 4:54 PM

    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"?

  • by redleader55 on 12/6/24, 4:59 PM

    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.

  • by trlpanv on 12/6/24, 4:22 PM

    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.