Electoral Commission hack exposed data of 40 million UK voters

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The personal information of approximately 40 million U.K. voters was exposed to hackers for more than a year after the Electoral Commission fell victim to a “complex cyberattack.”

The Electoral Commission, the watchdog responsible for overseeing elections in the U.K., said in a statement on Wednesday that it first identified suspicious activity on its network in October 2022, but later confirmed that unnamed “hostile actors” had first accessed its systems over a year earlier in August 2021.

We had to assess the extent of the incident to understand who might be impacted and liaise with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

These measures include strengthening its network login requirements, improving its threat monitoring capabilities and updating its firewall policies, according to an FAQ published by the Electoral Commission.

“The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting,” the Commission states.

“Defending the UK’s democratic processes is a priority for the NCSC and we provide a range of guidance to help strengthen the cyber resilience of our electoral systems.”

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3 comments

A reminder: this is the government that wants to ban encryption. In the Tories' dream scenario, data breaches like this will be happening to us every single day.
Another one to add to the list of data security cockups made by the UK government...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The personal information of approximately 40 million U.K. voters was exposed to hackers for more than a year after the Electoral Commission fell victim to a “complex cyberattack.”
The Electoral Commission, the watchdog responsible for overseeing elections in the U.K., said in a statement on Wednesday that it first identified suspicious activity on its network in October 2022, but later confirmed that unnamed “hostile actors” had first accessed its systems over a year earlier in August 2021.
We had to assess the extent of the incident to understand who might be impacted and liaise with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
These measures include strengthening its network login requirements, improving its threat monitoring capabilities and updating its firewall policies, according to an FAQ published by the Electoral Commission.
“The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting,” the Commission states.
“Defending the UK’s democratic processes is a priority for the NCSC and we provide a range of guidance to help strengthen the cyber resilience of our electoral systems.”
I'm a bot and I'm open source!