UK Electoral Commission hacked by ‘hostile actors’ for over a year

“Hostile actors” targeted Britain’s Electoral Commission in a complex cyber incident that involved hackers accessing internal emails and copies of voter data, the commission said on Tuesday.

“Today we announced that we have been the subject of a complex cyberattack, and our systems were accessed by hostile actors,” tweeted the independent body.

The Electoral Commission, the independent body which oversees elections and regulates political finance, said hackers had first accessed its systems in August 2021 and the incident was identified in October 2022, the commission said.

“We regret that it took so long to detect.”

It explained that it had needed to take remedial measures including blocking access to the hackers, assessing the extent of the incident and putting “additional security measures in place” before making the incident public.

It did not name the attackers, who had access to servers that held its email, control systems and copies of electoral registers containing details of millions of voters.