this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
63 points (100.0% liked)

United Kingdom

4109 readers
138 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
tom@feddit.uk
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
frankPodmore@slrpnk.net
63
Details of millions of UK voters accessed by Chinese state, ministers will say (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 8 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The personal details of millions of voters are believed to have been accessed in an attack by China on Britain’s democratic process.

With the UK under pressure to respond, multiple reports suggested that sanctions against individuals thought to be connected with the alleged activity are under strong consideration.

A small group of politicians who are hawkish on China are said to have been called to a briefing by parliament’s director of security, Alison Giles, in relation to the activity.

They include former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former minister Tim Loughton, the crossbench peer Lord Alton and the SNP MP Stewart McDonald, the Times reported.

The four are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) pressure group, which focuses on issues involving the increasingly assertive Asian power.

At an Ipac meeting on Friday, Luke de Pulford, its executive director, said: “About a year ago the Belgian and French foreign ministries publicly confirmed [Chinese state] sponsored cyber-attacks against our members.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

From what I can tell it was precisely because the Electoral Commission was not spending money with these kind of folks that they were breached. They were running on old software, poorly configured with minimal spend. They had just failed a security audit.

[–] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That might be the case here, fair. However it's borderline inept that the UK government cannot maintain a dedicated security and audit team for our data. The fact that they have to rely to large consultancy firms that bind the government into inadequate long term contracts is a depressing shame.

If you're interested check out the history of GDS and why it failed on its initial remit of encouraging more small to medium vendors. I'm not saying that would have helped here, but it highlights the problem of mega large multinational consultancy firms and their stranglehold over providing government services. The amount of money wasted will make your heart bleed.

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

My impression is that the UK has very little "in house" IT skill. A lot of UK digital infrastructure is pretty shoddy because of a longstanding over reliance on external contracting combined with a lack of a decent technical core within the civil service. It feeds into a cycle where fixing things would be too expensive, even though maintaining broken and old stuff is expensive and difficult even without crises like these. It's a mess.