Russian hackers attacked official Irish websites ahead of elections

As the Sunday Times revealed, numerous government and state websites were attacked by Russian hackers in the run-up to and during the local and European elections on Friday.

The websites of Irish Rail, Bus Eireann, Transport for Ireland, the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Leap Card app and the voter registration portal Voter.ie have been the target of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks in recent days.

A DDOS attack occurs when a website is deliberately overloaded with too many simultaneous online requests, collapses under the weight of these requests and becomes inaccessible to users.

The National Center for Cybersecurity had warned of the possibility of such attacks

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Ossian Smyth, the minister responsible for cybersecurity, described it as a “very minor and unsuccessful attack” that had little impact on functionality. of the websites.

The National Cyber ​​Security Centre (NCSC) had warned of the possibility of such attacks in the run-up to the election, Ireland’s first national vote in over four years, and officials informed Smyth yesterday while vote counting was still underway. The Electoral Commission was also informed of the attacks last Friday, it is understood.

A senior source with knowledge of the events said the attack came from Russia and targeted a number of websites in the hours before polls opened and on election day itself.
The hackers said online that they had targeted four European countries holding elections this weekend with DDOS attacks, and that Ireland was one of them.

Allan Liska, a cybersecurity expert at Recorded Future, a private threat analysis firm, said: “We are seeing hacktivist groups conducting such operations that just happen to align perfectly with the stated goals of the Russian government.

“There are several important elections taking place around the world this year and Russia is using this opportunity to increase both cyber and kinetic attacks, as recently happened in England, Latvia and Poland.

“This is likely an attempt to dampen support for Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion.”
Smyth, a Green MP, said: “The NCSC had predicted it and it was unsuccessful – I was able to access it through one of the websites they tried. There may have been some disruption but it was a fairly benign thing.”