The website of Poland’s governing party has been hit with a cyberattack days before the country holds the first round of a hotly contested presidential election.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk of the centrist Civic Platform party – whose presidential candidate is leading polls ahead of Sunday’s vote – blamed Russian hackers for the attack on Friday.
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In a post on social media, Tusk said: “Only two days before the Polish elections, a group of Russian hackers active on Telegram have attacked the Civic Platform internet sites.” He added that the websites of junior government coalition partners, the Left party and the agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL), were also targeted.
Jan Grabiec, who heads Tusk’s Prime Minister’s Office, said that both the party’s main website and one for presidential campaign donations were disabled.
Meddling by Moscow
The incident follows an apparent cyberattack in April, which saw Civic Platform’s IT systems targeted in what the government described as an attempt to gain control over the computers of party employees and election staff.
Such events fuel concerns among European democracies about election meddling sponsored by hostile governments, with Moscow being repeatedly blamed as the most likely culprit.
In December, Romania’s Constitutional Court voided a presidential ballot in which the far-right candidate Călin Georgescu had earned a surprising victory amid suspicions that Russia had instigated a fake viral social media campaign to swing the vote in his favor.
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Poland’s presidential vote on May 18 is crucial for Tusk’s government as the current president, the conservative Andrzej Duda, has repeatedly hindered the governing coalition’s attempts to follow through on campaign promises it made before winning parliamentary elections in 2023.
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