Electoral Commission and PSNI data breaches: what we know so far

The Electoral Commission said it had been targeted by a ‘complex cyber-attack’ in which hackers accessed the data of everyone registered to vote between 2014 and 2022. Photograph: Brian Jackson/Alamy

The UK election watchdog and Northern Ireland’s police service both announced serious data breaches on Tuesday, in the latest example of the vulnerability of personal details to hacks and human error.

The UK data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), is looking at the incidents, which have raised immediate safety concerns over the consequences of leaking personal data. Here is what has happened and what we know so far.