It won't affect the elections: Cyberattacks target municipal and party websites ahead of the elections
The vote count is not in danger despite recent hacker attacks. Parties and municipalities have been targeted by hackers, but Tuesday's election is not at risk, according to election officials.
According to the Danish news agency Ritzau, citing local media, election officials said that Tuesday's election process was not threatened after websites belonging to several parties and municipalities were hacked by pro-Russian groups in the run-up to the election.
Denmark is one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world, but in elections, voting and ballot counting are done manually. This strengthens the electoral process, according to the Interior Ministry's electoral office.
This provides a high level of robustness against IT failures or power outages, for example, and if you overdo it a little, you may end up counting votes in a narrow range.
The election results can then be calculated using a calculator, paper, and pen. It will take longer, but it won't prevent the votes from being counted, election consultant Christine Buskov says in a written comment to Ritsau.
The pro-Russian hacking group NoName057(16) wrote on social media that the group had shut down several websites in the few days leading up to the election.
This was done through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which work by overloading websites with massive amounts of data, potentially causing them to crash.
The Danish Agency for Community Safety wrote in a press release on Monday that it was aware of the attacks.
On election day, Tuesday, the new electoral system will be tested when votes are counted at polling stations.
Behind it is the municipalities' IT community, "Combet," which expects things to go well on election day, according to a statement made last week by CEO Christian Vingsgaard to the trade magazine Danske Kommuner, published by the Danish Association of Municipalities, as reported by Ritzau.
He also told the Danish municipalities: “The new system replaces a 30-40 year old system, and it started simply with the certainty and view of the fact that the world is a very different place today than it was when the old system was built.”.
He added that even if the election results website were to crash as a result of cyberattacks, it would not affect the elections and their results.
According to the Danish agency, an increase in the number of cyberattacks preceding the elections was expected, and ”it is unlikely that hackers will try to influence the elections themselves through cyberattacks.”.
