Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Friday blamed “Russian hackers” for a cyberattack that knocked his ruling party’s website offline ahead of a presidential vote this weekend.
The Civic Platform (PO) party’s candidate, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, is polling first in opinion surveys before round one of the ballot on Sunday.
“Only two days before the Polish elections a group of Russian hackers active on Telegram have attacked the Civic Platform internet sites,” Tusk said on X, adding that the attack was “still on”.
The hackers have also targeted “the websites of my coalition partners”, Tusk added.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused ‘Russian hackers’ of being behind the cyberattack – Copyright AFP STRINGER
According to Tusk’s office, the group carried out a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack — flooding the system with online traffic to make it inaccessible to legitimate users.
“PO’s main page and an additional one devoted to campaign donations have been temporarily disabled,” Jan Grabiec, Tusk’s chief of staff, said on X.
Grabiec said the party was working on getting the website back up and running.
NASK, a national research institute specialising in cybersecurity, had reported on Thursday attempts to interfere in the election campaign via messages consistent with Russian propaganda.
Last month, the government said Russian cyberattacks against Poland had intensified, and Tusk blamed “foreign interference” for one such attack on his party’s computer system that month.
Thirteen candidates of all stripes are vying to be the next president of the EU and NATO country of 38 million people.
Trzaskowski is currently the frontrunner, with around 30 percent of the vote in the latest opinion polls.
Nationalist historian Karol Nawrocki, endorsed by the right-wing main opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, is polling in second place at around 25 percent.
Analysts have said the future of Poland’s pro-EU government is riding on the presidential elections, which come at a fraught moment for Europe.
