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The European Parliament has an election security problem

[Note: trying out /c/politics’ new international politics focus]

EU elections are coming but the institution’s cybersecurity isn’t up to scratch to fight off the imminent deluge of attacks, insiders warn.

The European Union’s Parliament is gearing up for a major election next June but its cybersecurity "has not yet met industry standards” and is “not fully in-line with the threat level" posed by state-sponsored hackers and other threat groups, an internal review seen by POLITICO warns.

The European Parliament is ramping up its work to protect the integrity of their election against cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. With upcoming votes in key democratic countries including the United States, United Kingdom, India and across the European Union, officials are on high alert for geopolitical foes like Russia and China to attempt to tip the ballots in their favor through disinformation and cyberattacks.

The European Parliament’s IT department presented a report to a group of key members of the European Parliament (MEPs) earlier this month, warning that state-sponsored attacks on the Parliament have become more numerous and more sophisticated since its last election in 2019.

1 comments

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    This month, the United Kingdom, supported by its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence community and by EU countries, called out Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) for being behind "sustained, unsuccessful attempts to interfere in UK politics and democratic processes."

    Earlier in November, POLITICO reported that the EU's cyber team CERT-EU had warned that at least seven European governments had been targeted by a campaign to get access to internal systems, conducted by the Russian intelligence services' hacking group Fancy Bear.

    Pro-Russian hacktivist groups like Killnet have also plagued European governments with constant annoyances, mostly through distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) bringing down online services.

    Last year, the European Parliament website faced a "sophisticated" attack disrupting its services moments after members voted to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.

    During election campaigns, national and pan-European political parties also take a more central role in coordinating the process, further complicating control and administration.

    This year, the consultant firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) performed at least one external technical penetration test on the Parliament: i.e. a security assessment of the organization's digital perimeter.

    The original article contains 1,365 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!