Viginum flagged alleged BlackCore operations in Angola, Togo, New York and Scotland. That list is striking not because of where the campaigns appeared, but because of what investigators still cannot say about them. Marc-Antoine Brillant said it remained unclear who had commissioned BlackCore to interfere in France and other countries. The operations have geography. The sponsor does not.
Evidence is accumulating faster than accountability
The French service's most detailed findings came not from France but from Scotland. Viginum identified the mobilization of at least 256 accounts that enabled the spread of 1,400 comments, largely directed at the social media profiles of @JohnSwinney, @theSNP and @ScotGovFM. The activity involved “inauthentic accounts” on social media that coordinated online comments. The significance lies less in the volume than in the method: a small network created the appearance of broader political engagement.
That finding arrived in a country already debating whether its institutions can keep pace with new forms of political interference. The first minister described the Viginum report as “deeply concerning”. He warned that orchestrated disinformation campaigns and foreign election interference need to be taken seriously, while calling for urgent steps to counter foreign online political interference. He directed that pressure toward Westminster, arguing that the UK Government should make hostile state online interference a far higher priority. The warning was specific because the evidence was no longer hypothetical.
Reuters revealed that French authorities suspected BlackCore was behind an online smear campaign targeting three mayoral candidates from France Unbowed. The investigation pushed beyond individual candidates and toward a larger question: who benefits when influence operations can be deployed across multiple democracies while their sponsor remains invisible?
That question has become the centre of the French inquiry. Brillant said technical work had led Viginum to BlackCore, yet the investigations did not make it possible to identify the sponsor or sponsors behind the interference. He explicitly left open the possibility that sponsors, “if indeed they exist”, could not be identified. Investigators have linked activity to an operator. They have not linked the operator to a client. The chain of accountability breaks at precisely the point where political responsibility would begin.
The uncertainty has drawn governments into the investigation. The French government asked Israel for an explanation of BlackCore's actions and for help identifying who may have been behind the smear campaign. Israel's embassy in Paris said it was waiting to receive details from the French probe before conducting its own investigation. It added that Israel had “no intention to interfere in the French political process”. Diplomatic exchanges usually begin after attribution. Here they are occurring because attribution remains incomplete.
BlackCore's own description sharpened that ambiguity. The company described itself as an “elite influence, cyber, and technology company built for the modern era of information warfare”. It said it provided governments and political campaigns with tools and strategies to shape narratives. Then the firm deleted its online presence after Reuters made inquiries. The public sales pitch disappeared just as scrutiny intensified.
Institutional capacity is becoming part of the story
The pressure extends beyond any single investigation because the institutions expected to detect and deter interference appear to be operating with limited capacity. The Electoral Commission suggested staffing would need to increase to implement proposed measures. Dr Hawley noted that the UK spends £1 per voter on electoral regulation, compared with nearly £8 in Australia, £4 in Canada, and more elsewhere. The Commission recently received a budget increase, yet Hawley remained sceptical about delivery capacity. The debate is no longer whether interference exists; it is whether the institutions confronting it are scaled for the task.
That concern runs through the committee's broader assessment of political finance. The committee called for an immediate moratorium to pause the UK's current exposure, arguing that a ban alone would create a false sense of security. It described a system weakened by rising state threats, fragmented oversight and widening technological vulnerabilities, leaving political finance “too brittle, permissive, disjointed, slow, retrospective and underpowered to respond adequately”. The language is notable because it focuses less on individual actors than on institutional resilience.
What emerges from the BlackCore investigation is not a completed story of foreign interference but a documented gap between detection and attribution. Viginum released a detailed report alleging digital interference operations across several countries. Its chief says the commissioner remains unknown. The Electoral Commission says staffing must increase. A committee describes the wider system as underpowered. The uncomfortable fact is that the most concrete evidence in this chain is not who ordered the interference, but that democratic institutions are already being asked to prove they can withstand it without yet knowing who is testing them.
