Cyber-Attacks On UK Political Parties
A British political party will be the victim of a hack similar to those suffered by the Clinton and Macron presidential campaigns, a leading security researcher has warned.
James Norton, a former official at the US Department of Homeland Security and head of the security consultancy Play-Action Strategies, said: “It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s already been some emails stolen … it would surprise me if it didn’t happen.”
It was a matter of when, not if, a hack would take place, he said. “Campaigns are a treasure trove, especially newer campaigns where you’re trying to understand the dynamics … I would think they would be targets, if they’re not already, in terms of trying to understand what their politics would be. Even Theresa May is largely an unknown.”
The EU’s head of information security has previously advised that the risk of hacking attacks greatly increases following the dissolution of parliament. Dr Udo Helmbrecht cautioned candidates that any one of the thousands of political campaigns active over the election period could serve as a bulkhead from which to penetrate deeper into party machinery.
“If you look from a politician’s perspective or from a party’s perspective, you have different areas of concern,” Helmbrecht told the Guardian. “In Germany, the Bundestag was hacked. This was not a weakness in the classic infrastructure – it was naive treatment by parliamentarians.”
Dick O’Brien, a threat researcher at the security company Symantec, agreed that a hack like that on Macron “may well happen again”. Even a snap election left plenty of time for an interested party to take action, he added.
“The nature of elections means that politicians are ripe for attack. Governments are well secured, political parties not so much. And then a campaign expands from a core party into a much more ad hoc organisations. That’s where you see people using resources, cloud services, with email, that they really wouldn’t use in a more permanent organisation. That really opens up the surface for an attack.”
Unlike a French or US presidential campaign, British elections are much more fragmented, with more local power and smaller national oversight. From a security standpoint, that fragmentation can be a blessing and a curse: it offers compartmentalisation, ensuring that low-level breaches do not leak data for the entire campaign, but also leads to a marked increase in the number of potential targets for an external attacker.
None of the national campaigns would comment on security matters, but all are believed to take advice from GCHQ on protecting their networks. Sitting MPs are helped by the Parliamentary Digital Service until parliament dissolves. But for parliamentary candidates who weren’t MPs before the election was called, the amount of support differs wildly.
Ryan Kalember, head of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint, backed Norton’s warning. “Campaigns in elections around the world must ensure that they have implemented proper defences around phishing, including email security and multi-factor authentication, ideally via hardware keys,” he said.
“Our research has shown that attackers are relentlessly working to exploit the email communication channel regardless of their level of sophistication, motivation, or country. Email is their top target because it provides the easiest opening into an organisation, one of the easiest routes for exporting confidential information and for political purposes, email content itself offers an inside look at strategies, motivations and personalities.”
The fragmentation of constituency campaigns does offer security benefits as well, however. Campaigns’ access to data is limited to that relevant to their local area. Similarly, the vast array of different services used by various campaigns makes it harder to use a one-size-fits-all attack. A fake Gmail login page, for instance, will be less able to trick a campaign run from a Hotmail email address.
Political parties are using social media platforms more than ever - and much of their output is finely targeted and difficult to track.The Conservatives seem to be flooding Facebook users in marginal constituencies with anti-Jeremy Corbyn attack adverts, designed to draw away the Labour faithful. Labour are also using Facebook advertising, but their messages are less focused on leaders and their personalities.
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