The UK suffered one of the biggest cyber attacks in its history

Hackers have been accessing the systems of the UK’s Electoral Commission, which oversees the country’s elections, for more than a year. Data of 40 million voters exposed.

The UK Electoral Commission, which oversees the country’s elections, announced on Tuesday that it had been affected Cyber ​​attack by “hostile actors”. Those who have accessed its system for more than a year.

“We suffered a complex cyber attack and hostile actors gained access to our systems,” the independent organization tweeted, without naming the perpetrators of the cyber attack.

The latter accessed servers containing specific copies of the voter register with data on about 40 million voters.

“We know which systems were accessed by hostile actors, but we cannot be certain which files may or may not have been accessed,” Electoral Commission chief executive Sean McNally said in a statement.

So many great questions

According to the Election Commission, the cyber attack was identified in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected on its systems. Later “in August 2021 it became clear that hostile actors had first accessed the computers”.

“We regret that it took so long to locate them,” he added.

The Election Commission also did not mention why it took so long to inform the public about this massive infiltration leaving many questions unanswered.

He wanted to assure the Election Commission that “it is very difficult to use cyber attack to influence the democratic process”.

After the Brexit vote in 2016 and the next year’s general election, British officials suspected Russia of trying to influence the vote.

The Election Commission explained that it needs to take appropriate measures, including blocking access to hackers, assessing the scale of the incident and putting in place “additional security measures” before withdrawing the public incident.