Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
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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
If they have paper ballots a recount can be trusted. If they vote on a machine they would be trusting the machine that they say was targeted by those attacks. In general my opinion has always been that voting on a machine is a bad idea.
The breaches apparently didn't do much, the big reason why they cancelled the election was because the leading candidate declared 0 spending for his campaign, but it was proven he used russian money to fund countless tiktok videos that got him popular overnight. This is illegal under romanian law.
Personally, I don't think they should've been cancelled. It's a dubious thing to do under a democracy, and the runner-up was pretty decent anyway and had a chance for the second tour. I guess we'll see how it goes.
Whichever method you choose to redistribute (or ignore) the votes cast for that one candidate doesn't matter: you will always end up in election-doctoring territory, even if you do everything by the book and in the open.
Other systems, like ranked-choice voting, might not need a do-over because relative preferences are already expressed on the ballot. But in this case, canceling the entire vote and re-doing it is the only sensible solution.
Actual article:
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.”
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.
However, due to their enormous influence, they have avoided de jure registering as such.
By your logic, the Romanian dark horse can't possibly be a Russian op because they never officially registered as a Russian agent.
Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft's algorithms have similar reach.
The real issue here is that afaik no country ever figured out a good way to regulation election speech in a democracy, past social norms and economic realities.
I often think what the EU would have been, had they implemented a shorter austerity in the aftermath of '08, and hadn't succumbed to the migrants, choosing to enforce a strong and severe border regime. The social safety net and the sentiment for further integration would both have been much stronger.
But of course, Merkel gotta Merkel and Germany gotta Germany. There should be a lot more resentment against Germany than there is currently.
Consequently, they need immigration to maintain population growth.
Unfortunately, not many folks understand how many orders of magnitude more difficult it is to maintain an economy and quality of life in a shrinking country.
Shrinking demographics are a consequence of a high education workforce, along with an uncontrolled immigration crisis. Importing randos to procreate with your native population is not a winning strategy.
In an ideal scenario, Germany and Japan would have collaborated on developing tools and technologies for automation. You sustain your growth with widespread use of robotic technologies.
Turns out, when you promise people more money, less taxes, and fewer of "them" (whoever the them-du-jour is), they tend to vote for you!
Historically, this truth has been balanced out by trustworthy news sources, but social media effectively imploded 80% of those by eating their ad revenue.
The problems the EU faces are the problems every one of the members would face alone. The system isn't perfect and needs constant tweaking but the alternative is being alone against the likes of Russia or China.
It won't achieve anything. The issue is not about China/Russia/America or mobile apps it's about media and media control.
Even your comment is filled with a negative narrative - Western Democracies VS our enemies ( China, Russia, etc ... ).
> drive out American relationships for China and Russia to take over quietly
Is it bad for a union to have multiple relationships or multiple vectors of development?
> it is creating mayhem in the systems we have grown to trust
I don't see it, but if something can cause a mayhem in the systems this means that these systems are flawed?
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.
I think there is even an XKCD about this.