Last night’s 1922 committee meeting with backbenchers and Lord Cameron didn’t appease the China hawks the way it intended. Much of the meeting was consumed by anger over the government still labelling China as a mere “challenge“. Not least Sir Iain Duncan Smith saying the position was like “an elephant giving birth to a mouse”…
It seems fury from the backbenches has hit home. This morning on Times Radio Education Secretary Gillian Keegan conceded that China was indeed a “security threat“. Perhaps because of latest revelations exposed by an unprecedented joint operation by Washington and London that there’s been a decade-long campaign of Chinese espionage…
Now it looks like Deputy Prime Minister Dowden will declare China as threat, telling MPs “we are currently in the process of collective Government agreement”. What will Lord Cameron say?
The Electoral Commission (EC) has revealed it was the victim of a “complex cyber-attack” first identified in October 2022, with unidentified hackers gaining access to private servers holding email records, control systems, and copies of the electoral registers. The EC admit this includes the names and addresses of those registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, along with the Commission’s internal email database …
Electoral Commission Chief Executive Shaun McNally apologised for the breach this afternoon, admitting the EC didn’t have “sufficient protections” in place at the time. Worrying to say the least…
“The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting. This means it would be very hard to use a cyber-attack to influence the process. Nevertheless, the successful attack on the Electoral Commission highlights that organisations involved in elections remain a target, and need to remain vigilant to the risks to processes around our elections.
“We regret that sufficient protections were not in place to prevent this cyber-attack. Since identifying it we have taken significant steps, with the support of specialists, to improve the security, resilience, and reliability of our IT systems.”
The Commission say they’ve since upgraded their IT systems and security measures. You’d hope so – this sort of thing is becoming more common…
After the brutal hacking of Education Secretary Gillian Keegan over Christmas, which saw her account fire out dozens of spam crypto links before being wiped entirely, Twitter hackers scored another victory this morning as they managed to get into Chris Heaton-Harris’s account. And Anna Soubry’s for good measure…
Just after 7am, Chris posted a number of confusing tweets calling for the freeing of a person called “mizz”, as well as posting a selfie of a man captioned, “imran khan poor p*ki and minecraft roleplayer”. Soubry fell victim to the same scammer, calling someone a “n*g n*g”…
While it did appear Heaton-Harris had managed to wrestle back control of his account a lot quicker than his cabinet counterpart managed – tweeting a confirmation of the hacking – a subsequent tweet about forcing all trans and homosexuals to work behind a bar for 10 years implies that’s not the case.
You would hope the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland had better security procedures in place…
Following the hacking of one of No. 10’s EU negotiation team’s phones in August, Guido posed the question who would have most to gain from illegally accessing the WhatsApp messages of a top member of the UK’s Brexit team. Coincidentally, it’s been reported today the EU Council of Ministers has an “almost complete” resolution on the table to ban end-to-end encryption on apps like WhatsApp, mandating access of “competent authorities in area of security & criminal justice.” Another day, another reason to breathe a sigh of relief over Brexit…
Despite the obvious enthrallment of the LibDem leadership election, the question on the minds of Westminster SpAds today is who was behind the suspected recent hacking of a government mobile phone belonging to one of No. 10’s EU negotiation team members. Fellow SpAds were alerted to the security breach after the SpAd left a number of WhatsApp chats and Guido understands the civil service advised them to wipe the phone clean. Who would have most to gain from hacking the phone of a member of the country’s Brexit negotiation team?
As part of its settlement with Hugh Grant, the Mirror Group has made an apology and today admitted the following (the quote is from the court statement):
“A number of its senior employees, including executives, editors and journalists, condoned, encouraged or actively turned a blind eye to the widespread culture of unlawful information-gathering activities at all three of its newspapers for many years and actively sought to conceal its wrongdoing from its many victims of intrusion. its repeated and prolonged intrusions into innocent people’s lives over, in some instances, a decade, could have been prevented or interrupted. Instead, Trinity Mirror failed to properly investigate these disgraceful actions and/or to act sufficiently when the allegations of MGN’s journalists’ unlawful activities were first alleged and publicly emerged in 2006 and when the first inquiries into these wrongdoings were made.”
I’ve never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone.
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 19, 2011
Awkward…
