Mr. Joseph Stephens:

I think Dr. Browne has touched on the key point in the advice we have given to political organisations like political parties, as well as parliamentary staff and politicians. While the most talked-about risks might be things like deepfakes, artificial intelligence and so on, our experience of elections throughout the globe has been that it has really been smaller-scale, individual hacks on peoples' Gmail accounts, of social media accounts and of personal devices.

It is really important, as politicians, electoral candidates or prospective politicians, that people are taking those basic security measures that Dr. Browne talked about earlier on. Is multi-factor authentication turned on? When logging into Twitter, does a code have to be approved somewhere else or can I log straight in with a password? If Twitter can be logged straight into with a password, a malicious actor could guess the password and get into the account and spread malicious information from the account, which could have an effect on the election. The idea is not, as Dr. Browne said, to steal information, it is to affect people's perception and make them think something malicious has occurred in respect of the election.

We also have provided advice directly to the local authorities who are running the elections. That is not public advice; it is being provided directly to them. We see the risk as being much more on the candidate side rather than in respect of the systems. In Ireland, as our approach is very much paper-based, cyber is not as much of a concern there. That is really it. The advice is very straightforward and we have tried to keep it as simple as possible. We have linked in with the Electoral Commission and Coimisiún na Meán has also given advice on wider issues in terms of security. We are at the disposal of Deputies and electoral candidates and we are open to providing additional advice if anyone has any questions.