EU security services collectively strive to prevent hackers from influencing elections
On the 18th of December, the German President of the Federal Office for Security and Information Technology (BSI), Arne Schoenbohm, stated in an interview with Welt am Sonntag that the security services of European countries exchange information in order to prevent the intervention of hackers into elections that will take place in a number of EU Member States in 2017.
The cyberattack on the IT systems of the Bundestag in Spring 2015, and an attempt to hack party servers, have given rise to a serious concern about possible targeted manipulations of public opinion by third parties, particularly in view of the election campaign prior to the 2017 Bundestag elections, Schoenbohm said.
The President of the Federal Office for Security and Information Technology (BSI) confirmed that, according to German security services, the latest large cyberattacks on parliamentary and party IT systems of the Federal Republic of Germany were conducted from Russia.
In November, the British Standards Institution presented a report for the first half of 2016. According to this report, approximately 44,000 emails that were infected with viruses were successfully intercepted in Government networks during that period. The presidential elections in France will be held in April 2017 and parliamentary elections in Germany are expected to be held in September.