British Voters Wide Open To Attack

Uploaded on 2023-09-11 in GOVERNMENT-National, FREE TO VIEW, TECHNOLOGY--Hackers

Britain’s natonal Electoral Commission faced significant cyber security failings shortly before a major data breach, where hackers potentially accessed the data of millions of voters, including sensitive information not available on public registers. Now the UK’s Electoral Commission itself has confirmed it failed a basic cyber security test at about the same time some hackers attacked the organisation.

This follows previous warnings that the UK’s Election Commission had failed the Cyber Essentials test in multiple areas, including the use of outdated and vulnerable devices and software.

The unnamed attackers accessed Electoral Commission email correspondence and could have viewed databases containing the names and addresses of 40 million registered voters, including millions of those not on public registers.

The Commission has said that "hostile actors" hacked into its emails and potentially the data of 40 million voters.
The hackers obtained the “name and address of anyone in the UK who registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, as well as the names of those registered as overseas voters.” Government officials pointed the finger of blame at Russia with Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, reported as saying that Russia was the prime suspect.

The Commission has now determined that the attack started in August 2021, although it was not detected until October 2022. The commission has since disclosed that it did not pass the test due to two issues which it contends are unrelated to the hack:

An earlier version of Windows software found running on some Commission laptops
An outdated version of operating system software on staff mobiles.

It said these problems were not linked to the attack, which affected the organisation’s email servers.

Cyber Essentials is voluntary but widely used by organisations as a way to show customers they are security-aware. The government requires all suppliers bidding for contracts involving the handling of certain sensitive and personal information to hold an up-to-date Cyber Essentials certificate. But the Commission failed in multiple areas when it tried to get certified in 2021.

When the hack was first disclosed, the Electoral Commission said that the data hacked from the full electoral register was "largely in the public domain". However, less than half the data on the open register, which can be purchased, is publicly available, so the hackers would have accessed data belonging to tens of millions of people who opted out of the public list.

Cyber Essentials is a standard that UK government requires of all suppliers, however, it was originally created to help small businesses, not large corporates.

Electoral Commission: Safety Detectives: BBC: Guardian: Silicon: CSO Online: Computer Weekly:

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