The UK Electoral Commission says it suffered a serious cyber attack that revealed the personal information of the entire electoral database for over a year between August 2021 and October 2021./Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett.
It is less than a year until the next general election in the UK and yet the country's Electoral Commission says it suffered a serious cyber attack by "hostile actors" that had access to personal information of the entire electoral database for over year.
A statement by the Commission, which is the independent body overseeing elections and regulates political finance in Britain, revealed that the database had initially been hacked in August 2021 before being recognized over a year later in October 2022.
A statement by the Commission on social media platform X, said: "Hostile actors were active in our systems and had access to servers which held our email, control systems, and copies of the electoral registers," it said in a series of posts on social media platform X.
The data in the registers - including the name and address of those registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and the names of overseas voters - was already in the public domain, the commission added.
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The commission has worked with Britain's National Cyber Security Centre and external experts to investigate the incident and had since made improvements to the security of its IT systems, it said.
In a separate statement on the Electoral Commission's official website, the organization insists individuals are unlikely to be personally affected by the attack.
The statement said that personal data, such as names and addresses "does not in itself present a high risk to individuals" but added that "this data could be combined with other data in the public domain, such as that which individuals choose to share themselves, to infer patterns of behavior or to identify and profile individuals."
The Commission added that the attack "has not had an impact on the electoral process, the rights or access to the democratic process of any individual, nor has it affected anyone's electoral registration status."
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