Polish ruling parties under cyberattack by Russian hackers two days before election, says PM Tusk

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, has announced that there is an ongoing cyberattack by Russian hackers against his Civic Platform (PO) party and two of its coalition partners, The Left (Lewica) and the Polish People’s Party (PSL). The incident has happened just ahead of Sunday’s presidential election.

“Two days before the elections, a group of Russian hackers operating on Telegram attacked the websites of Civic Platform,” wrote Tusk on social media on Friday afternoon. “The Left and PSL websites are also targeted.”

“The [Polish security] services are conducting intensive activities in this case,” he added. “The attack is ongoing.”

At the time of writing, PO and PSL’s websites are inaccessible, with error messages appearing instead. Websites linked to The Left are currently working, though were also down earlier on Friday.

A few hours before Tusk’s announcement, his chief of staff, Jan Grabiec, had reported that a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) had been underway against PO’s website since 9 a.m. DDoS attacks seek to flood their target with traffic in order to overload the system and render it inoperable.

Grabiec said that the attack had also targetted a page where there is a form allowing people to make donations to the campaign of PO’s presidential candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski.

“Blocking the main page of the party that supports Rafał Trzaskowski on the last day of the election campaign is of course a hindrance, because it contains current information and the possibility of collecting payments is temporarily blocked,” said Grabiec, quoted by broadcaster RMF.

Jacek Dziura, a spokesman for NASK, a state agency tasked with monitoring cyberthreats, told Polsat News that they “can confirm that the pro-Russian group ‘noname057’ is responsible for today’s DDoS attacks on some Polish websites”.

“In the case of all DDoS attacks such as this one, we remind you that the attackers are seeking to gain publicity and sow unrest and chaos,” he added. “We ask for consideration in terms of communicating this.”

Last month, Tusk also announced that PO’s IT systems had suffered a major cyberattack that had an “eastern footprint”, an apparent accusation towards Russia or Belarus. He said the incident was an attempt at “foreign interference” in the upcoming presidential election.

However, earlier this week, Rzeczpospolita, a leading newspaper, reported that, six weeks on from that incident, no investigation into it has yet been initiated by Polish prosecutors.

Last week, Poland’s digital affairs minister, Krzysztof Gawkowski, warned that there was “an unprecedented attempt by Russia to interfere in the Polish elections”. He said that there had been cyberattacks against the IT systems of all candidates competing in Sunday’s election.

Recent days have also seen a controversy over alleged foreign interference in Poland’s election campaign after NASK announced on Wednesday that it had identified a large number of political adverts on Facebook that were likely to have been funded from abroad – something that would violate Polish law.

The adverts expressed support for Trzaskowski or criticism of his two main right-wing rivals, Karol Nawrocki and Sławomir Mentzen. However, there is no evidence that Trzaskowski, his campaign or PO was involved in them.

Opposition parties have, however, criticised NASK for failing to respond to the issue earlier and have accused of it providing misleading and sometimes false information in its communication about the incident.

Main image credit: Kancelaria Sejmu/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 2.0)