Norway’s Conservative Party (Høyre) has been lagging in public opinion polls and this week its website was hit by a cyber attack, just six days before the Parliamentary election on Monday. A pro-Russian activist group has claimed responsibility but that hasn’t been confirmed.
“We discovered that our website was down and alerted national security officials immediately,” the party’s secretary general, Tom Erlend Skaug, told state broadcaster NRK. Norway’s national security agency (NSM) wouldn’t conclude who was behind the attack (a so-called Distributed Denial of Service) but confirmed that a pro-Russian group had bragged about the attack “on its own channels.”
Ine Eriksen Søreide, a former foreign minister for the Conservatives, told NRK that any tampering with the upcoming election is “extremely serious, but unfortunately not surprising.” She noted how both of Norway’s intelligence agencies and a national research institute had warned of such attacks and attempts to influence the election result.
The latest polls on Friday morning showed the Conservatives with their worst pre-election standing in many years, with less than 15 percent of the vote. The incumbent Labour Party was doing much better while the now-left-leaning Greens Party continued its rise. That led some election analysts to predict a Labour victory on Monday that would keep Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in office.
NewsinEnglish.no staff
