Cyber-attack on UK’s electoral registers revealed

The UK's elections watchdog has revealed it has been the victim of a complex cyber-attack" potentially affecting millions of voters.

The Electoral Commission said unspecified hostile actors" had managed to gain access to copies of the electoral registers, from August 2021.

Hackers also broke into its emails and control systems" but the attack was not discovered until October last year.

The watchdog has warned people to watch out for unauthorised use of their data.

That seems like a state-level attack, and such data could easily be used for online influence campaigns during elections, something that is happening all over the western world right now. I wonder just how bad the hack actually was? Millions of voters" sounds bad, but...

The commission says it is difficult to predict exactly how many people could be affected, but it estimates the register for each year contains the details of around 40 million people.

Holy cow.