The hacking of Britain’s elections watchdog was a “significant failing” that should never recur, a minister said on Wednesday after details on tens of millions of voters were accessed.
As experts pointed blame at the Kremlin, the Electoral Commission said there was little risk of “hostile actors” being able to influence the outcome of a vote, but apologised for the breach in its systems.
The revelation coincided with news that the personal details of thousands of Police Service of Northern Ireland officers and civilian staff had been compromised - prompting expressions of serious alarm by police chiefs and politicians there.
In Britain, the election registers held at the time of the cyber-attack include the name and address of anyone who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, and the names of voters registered overseas. But no-one registered anonymously was exposed.
“This is a significant failing,” Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said on LBC radio.
“That’s why the Electoral Commission have worked with the National Crime Agency to put in place procedures so this can never happen again.
“What the government can do is to hold them to account, to provide them with the resources through the National Crime Agency and National Cyber Security Centre to improve their procedures.”
The Home Office has already set up a “defending democracy task force”, Mr Jenrick noted, after previous allegations that Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia tried to meddle in Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 General Election.
The task force “seeks to bring all of these stakeholders together to protect our electoral system against interference, whether that be from hostile states or from other actors, which I’m afraid does occur today and is likely to be a feature of our diplomatic and security situation in the years ahead”, the minister said.
The attack was identified in October 2022, but the hackers had first been able to access the Electoral Commission’s systems in August 2021, the watchdog revealed on Tuesday.
Former GCHQ director David Omand told BBC Radio 4 that Putin’s government was “first on my list of suspects”. Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-head of MI6, told the Telegraph that the Kremlin would “be at the top of the suspects list by a mile”.
Electoral Commission chief executive Shaun McNally said: “The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting.
“This means it would be very hard to use a cyber-attack to influence the process,” he said, while stressing that the Commission had taken “significant measures” with the National Cyber Security Centre to improve its IT systems.
Liam Kelly, chairman of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, meanwhile said on Wednesday that he had been “inundated” with messages from officers who were “shocked, dismayed and basically angry” after the data breach there.
Alliance Party leader Naomi Long said “major questions” arose from the breach, which she said revealed “systemic failures” in the force.
