UK elections 'unaffected' by China's cyber-interference

The UK's deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, says China has been unsuccessful in its attempts to undermine UK elections. It comes as the UK and US today formally called out China's aggression in cyberspace, pinning its state-sponsored attackers to incidents at the Electoral Commission in 2021 and attempts to target 43 parliamentarians in the same year. "I want to reassure people that the compromise of this information, while it is obviously concerning, typically does not create a risk to those affected, and I want to further reassure the House that the Commission has worked with security specialists to investigate the incident and remove the threat from their system," he said. "The Commission has since taken further steps to increase the resilience of their systems." The 2021 cyberattack on the Electoral Commission saw 40 million voters' data exposed but was only publicized in August 2023. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) this week said email data and information from the Electoral Register was stolen during the incident. "The data, in combination with other data sources, 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 UK," it added. The attack on the Electoral Commission was linked by security experts at the time to ProxyNotShell – an exploit chain that allowed for remote code execution on vulnerable Microsoft Excha...