COPENHAGEN: Denmark voted in local and regional elections expected to deliver a blow to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, after a campaign marred by cyberattacks. In Denmark, 75 per cent of public spending is managed through local governments, highlighting the importance of the elections.
Tuesday’s vote follows a final week of campaigning marked by cyberattacks targeting the websites of the government, municipalities and political parties, claimed by pro-Russian hacker group NoName057(16). “DDoS attacks are part of the landscape,” the Danish Civil Protection Agency said in a statement, noting that the intelligence services had anticipated an increase in such attacks around the elections.
DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks halt access to a website by overloading its servers with traffic. Local issues such as schools, healthcare and elderly care have dominated the campaign, Moller Hansen said. Transportation has also been a major issue, particularly in Copenhagen, where candidates have clashed over the number of parking spaces in a city that has more bicycles than cars. Across the country, around 10,000 candidates are standing for either municipal or regional offices, vying for the ballots of 4.7 million registered voters. — AFP
