By Emmanuel Nduka
The United Kingdom’s Electoral Commission, a body which oversees the country’s elections, announced on Tuesday that it had been hacked by “hostile actors” who had access to its system for more than a year.
“Today we announced that we have been the subject of a complex cyber-attack, and our systems were accessed by hostile actors,” the commission tweeted.
But 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 in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected on its systems.
“We know which systems were accessible to the hostile actors, but are not able to know conclusively what files may or may not have been accessed.
“It became clear that hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021. We regret that it took so long to detect,” Chief Executive Shaun McNally, the Electoral Commission said in a statement.
The body added 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.
