According to documents declassified by Romania’s main security council on Wednesday, the country has been the target of “aggressive hybrid attacks by Russia” during a period of back-to-back elections.
Romanians will vote on Sunday in a presidential election runoff that could see Calin Georgescu, a far-right and pro-Russian NATO critic, beat pro-European centrist Elena Lasconi, a result that could isolate Romania to the West.
With polls in the single digits ahead of the first round of the November 24 presidential election, Georgescu, who wants to end Romania’s support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, scored a victory which raised questions about how such a surprise had been possible in a member state of the European Union and NATO.
In one of the unclassified documents, the Romanian intelligence agency claims that Georgescu benefited from massive promotion on the social media platform TikTok through coordinated accounts, recommendation algorithms and paid promotion . Georgescu said he spent no funds on the campaign.
The intelligence service also said that access data to official Romanian election sites were published on Russian cybercrime platforms. The access data was likely obtained by targeting legitimate users or exploiting the legitimate training server, the agency said.
It added that it had identified more than 85,000 cyberattacks aimed at exploiting system vulnerabilities.
Russia has denied any interference in Romania’s election campaigns.
“The attacks continued intensively, including on election day and the night following the election,” the agency said in a declassified document.
“The modus operandi and scale of the campaign lead us to conclude that the attacker has considerable resources specific to an attacking state.
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