There have been disruptions to the opposition Centre Party's website on regional and municipal election day.
According to the party's communications manager, Juha Määttä, the site was targeted by a brief distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Sunday morning, which began shortly after 9am. Määttä told the Finnish news agency STT that a new attack on the site began around 1pm.
As a result of the attacks, the Centre's website was not accessible, with the pages displaying an error code.
The daily Helsingin Sanomat was among the first to report on the problems with the Centre's website.
Määttä told the newspaper that a DDoS attack had also been carried out on the Centre website in the middle of this past week, and that the NoName hacker group was behind it. Määttä said that the same group could be behind Sunday’s attacks.
The attacker was identified by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-FI), which operates under the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom).
According to NCSC-FI, the "pro-Russian hacktivist group" NoName057(16) carried out DDoS attacks on several Finnish websites over the past week. These included the sites of organisations in the energy, finance and logistics sectors.
NCSC-FI said that "the hacktivist DDoS attacks are likely aimed at gaining visibility for their political stance" and that the group makes "exaggerated claims…that could be classified as disinformation, for example about Finnish politicians or Finnish foreign policy".
NCSC-FI warned that attacks might also be seen during the election weekend.
"In some cases, attacks could cause temporary disruptions to election-related services, such as the results service, but the actual election result and its reliability cannot be affected by DDoS attacks," NCSC-FI stated in its weekly review.
The centre said that preparations had been made for such disruptions linked to the elections and that authorities were exchanging information on any relevant observations.
Määttä noted that candidate lists and numbers can be found on official websites as well as polling stations.