#UK #Cybersecurity #Elections #Hacking #Privacy #DataProtection: "Confidence in the UK’s electoral regulator has been thrown into question after it emerged a hostile cyber-attack accessing the data of 40 million voters went undetected for a year and the public was not told for another 10 months.
The Electoral Commission apologised for the security breach in which the names and addresses of all voters registered between 2014 and 2022 were open to “hostile actors” as far back as August 2021.
The attack was discovered last October and reported within 72 hours to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), as well as the National Crime Agency. However, the public has only now been informed that the electoral registers containing the data of millions of voters may have been accessible throughout that time.
The Electoral Commission said it was “not able to know conclusively” what information had been accessed. It is not known whether the attackers were linked to a hostile state, such as Russia, or a criminal cyber gang."