A growing international scandal over suspected cross-border digital election meddling has expanded after France’s national disinformation watchdog Viginum confirmed that an Israeli cyber company already accused of sabotaging French local elections is also suspected of interference efforts in elections in New York City and Scotland, global news agency Reuters reported.
The accusations were laid out publicly during a Thursday press conference that included French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, where Viginum director Marc-Antoine Brillant stated that technical forensic investigations had pointed to Israeli cyber firm BlackCore as the actor behind the global influence operations. Brillant emphasized that the company’s pattern of covert meddling was not confined to France’s municipal election cycle.
“This modus operandi was not limited to municipal elections in France,” Brillant told reporters. “It also appears to have been used to carry out foreign digital interference operations in other countries or regions, such as Angola, Togo, the elections in Scotland, and the 2025 municipal election in New York.”
As it stands, however, French investigators have not been able to uncover who ultimately commissioned BlackCore to carry out the covert interference operations targeting French political candidates. Brillant acknowledged that ongoing probes have not yielded definitive answers about the identity of any hidden backers.
“Our investigations did not make it possible to identify the sponsor or sponsors, if indeed they exist, behind this foreign digital interference,” he said.
The first public allegations against BlackCore emerged last month, when French authorities tied the firm to a coordinated online smear campaign targeting three left-wing mayoral candidates from France Unbowed (LFI), a leftist party with explicit pro-Palestine positions. The covert interference campaign, first detected by Viginum in March, leveraged fake websites, inauthentic social media profiles, and targeted negative digital advertising to spread false criminal accusations—including claims of sexual assault—against candidates running in the cities of Marseille, Toulouse, and Roubaix.
A subsequent joint investigation by French outlet *Libération* and Israeli newspaper Haaretz found digital traces of the operation on a server linked to BlackCore and two other Tel Aviv-based companies. Lecornu confirmed that the French government has formally requested that Israeli authorities provide explanations for BlackCore’s alleged activities and assist in identifying the hidden backers of the smear campaign.
“I do not doubt for a single instant that if a French private group, from French soil moreover, had engaged in foreign digital interference in Israel, they would have done the same to its ambassador on site,” Lecornu added.
Israel’s embassy in Paris has confirmed that French officials reached out regarding the case, noting that Israeli authorities are waiting to receive full details of the French investigation to launch their own internal inquiry.
Notably, Brillant did not explicitly name the targets of the alleged interference in New York City’s 2025 election, which was won by Zohran Mamdani, a candidate well known for his public support of the Palestinian cause. Multiple relevant stakeholders, including Mamdani’s team, the New York Police Department, and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, have not yet responded to Reuters’ requests for comment, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to issue any statement on the matter.
Viginum also confirmed that social media accounts linked to BlackCore targeted Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney, who has publicly labeled the humanitarian situation in Gaza a man-made catastrophe and warned that a genocide could be unfolding in the besieged territory.
Before the allegations became public, BlackCore removed all of its public online presence following press inquiries. Prior to taking its website offline, the firm marketed itself as “an elite influence, cyber, and technology company built for the modern era of information warfare” that offered governments and political campaigns “cutting-edge strategies, advanced tools, and robust security to shape narratives.” BlackCore has not responded to multiple repeated requests for comment on the allegations from news organizations.