It could happen here. Three years after Russian disinformation campaigns disrupted the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possibly influenced the result of the Brexit vote, European officials are worried the European Parliament election in May is next. “In 2016 we stopped being naive,” said Liisa Past, a former chief research officer at the Estonian Information System Authority who coordinated security preparations across Europe last year. “Since then we have tested national systems for the security environment as we now know it. But the last European election was 2014 and that system hasn’t been tested in this new security environment.” The election — in which voters in 27 countries will install a new European Parliament and by extension a new crop of top EU officials — is uniquely vulnerable, officials say.
“Given the dispersed nature and comparatively long duration of the European Parliament elections, they present a tempting target for malicious actors,” European Commissioner for Security Julian King told POLITICO. “Everyone needs to take responsibility for this — a system is only as secure as the weakest link in the chain.”
The “European election” is in fact a series of simultaneous elections that will take place on May 23-26, in which the integrity of the vote depends on how 27 national governments fend off hackers and other threats. And while some governments are better prepared than others, it would only take one successful act of disruption to cast doubt on the composition of the next European Parliament.
Full Article: Europe’s most hackable election – POLITICO.