Czech election websites hacked
The websites announcing the Czech Republic’s election results were hacked on Saturday, according to the Czech Statistical Office (CSU), although it said the vote count was unaffected.
The election results were shown on two websites that the CSU manages with an outside provider.
“During the processing, there was a targeted ‘DDoS’ attack aimed at the infrastructure of the O2 company used for elections,” CSU announced online.
“As a result, servers volby.cz and volbyhned.cz had been temporarily partly inaccessible. The attack did not in any way affect either the infrastructure used for the transmission of election results to the CSU headquarters or the independent data processing.”
EU defence ministers prepared in September for a potential hacking attack in their first cyber war exercise.
The populist, right-wing Ano won 29.6 per cent of the vote, nearly three times as much as its closest rival, but may struggle to form a coalition with other parties rejecting the idea of partnership and its billionaire leader Andrej Babis facing fraud charges.
Babis, the second richest Czech, has been compared to other tycoon/politicians Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi.
Ano will have 78 parliamentarians in the 200-seat lower house so still needs partners from the other eight parties to establish a working majority, but Babis’ anti-establishment rhetoric has made it difficult to forge deals.
The centre-right Civic Democrats, who came second with 25 seats, said they would spurn Babis’ invitations.
“I have already ruled out talks with Ano on taking part in a government or supporting a government,” party leader Petr Fiala said, according to Seznam.cz.
In joint third place, with 22 seats each, are the Pirate party and the anti-Muslim, far-right SPD. The Communists took 15 seats and came sixth.
The centre-left Social Democrat government of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, which won just 7.3 per cent of the vote, said it would talk to Ano, which is the current coalition partner, but only if Babis did not join the administration.
Police allege Babis hid ownership of one of his firms a decade ago to receive a €2 million EU subsidy that was meant for smaller employers. He denies the allegations.
He moved his chemicals, food and media firms to a trust earlier this year when he was finance minister in the outgoing government, to meet conflict of interest requirements.
Prague. Picture credit: Pixabay