The Electoral Commission, Britain’s elections watchdog, announced last year that it had been hit by a complex cyberattack in which its systems were accessed by then-unnamed “hostile actors.”
According to a release by Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Monday, the country’s security services found that the commission’s systems were “highly likely compromised by a China state-affiliated cyber entity between 2021 and 2022.” The U.K. foreign office, in its own statement, stressed that this “malicious” activity has not had an impact on Britain’s electoral processes.
But the NCSC said it was “highly likely” that Electoral Commission email data had been accessed and taken in the attack, and that this information would “highly likely be used by the Chinese intelligence services for a range of purposes, including large-scale espionage and transnational repression of perceived dissidents and critics in the U.K.”
MPs targeted
Dowden’s statement follows a report by the Sunday Times this weekend which claimed that a number of British parliamentarians were directly targeted by China. At a press conference earlier Monday, three of the MPs named — all members of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — said they won’t be “bullied into silence” by Beijing.
The foreign office said it was “almost certain” that APT31 — a hacking crew with links to the Chinese state — had “conducted reconnaissance activity against U.K. parliamentarians during a separate campaign in 2021.”
Dowden — who said further announcements would be coming from other countries in the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership later Monday — announced that the U.K. is sanctioning two people linked to both the Chinese state and to APT31.
