UK blames China for massive leak of voter data

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The British government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of British voters.

British Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said in a statement to MPs in Parliament on Monday that the 2021 Electoral Commission data breach was the work of hackers working for the Chinese government.

Mr Dowden told MPs that the UK government “will not hesitate to take swift and strong action when the Chinese government threatens our interests”.

This is the first time the UK has revealed the cause of the breach since the cyberattack was first revealed in 2023.

The Electoral Commission, which keeps copies of Britain’s voter register, said at the time that hackers had stolen the names and addresses of an estimated 40 million British citizens between 2014 and 2022, including people who registered to vote and overseas voters. He said it was stolen. The data breach started as early as 2021, but was discovered a year later.

Britain’s National Cyber ​​Security Center (NCSC) said in a statement on Monday that it was “likely” that Chinese hackers gained access to the electoral register during the hack and leaked emails and data.

The NCSC said Chinese intelligence could use the data for “large-scale espionage and cross-border repression of perceived dissidents and critics within the UK”.

In an interview with TechCrunch, an NCSC spokesperson declined to attribute the election commission’s data breach to a specific Chinese-backed actor.

Mr Dowden said another attempted cyber attack by a Chinese-backed hacker group targeted the email accounts of British MPs in 2021, but parliamentary authorities mitigated the attempt before the email accounts were compromised. said.

The NCSC attributed these email hacking attempts to a Chinese hacker group known as APT31, known for targeting the online accounts of foreign government officials. Security researchers say APT31 uses malware that is capable of creating backdoors in systems and exfiltrating sensitive information. The Norwegian government previously blamed APT31 for a data breach on its systems in 2018.

The UK did not say which MPs’ email accounts were targeted, but the NCSC said most of the affected MPs were “prominent figures condemning China’s malign activities”. .

Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the UK, denied the allegations, saying that China “does not encourage, support or condone attacks by hackers,” but said it would “resort to lawful means” to counter cyber attacks. ” he added.

Paul Chichester, NCSC’s director of operations, said: “The malicious activity we have exposed today demonstrates a broader pattern of unacceptable behavior by Chinese state-linked actors towards the UK and countries around the world.” “Targeting our democratic system is unacceptable, and the NCSC will continue to condemn cyber attackers who pose a threat to the institutions and values ​​that underpin our society.”

CNN reported Monday that the Biden administration is preparing to charge several Chinese hackers with involvement in the APT31 effort targeting U.S.-based companies. In 2020, Google security researchers implicated APT31 in targeting email accounts belonging to President Trump and the Biden presidential campaign.

Last month, a series of documents leaked from Chinese government contractor Easun revealed how the private contractor targets and hacks other governments at the request of Chinese authorities.