British Parliament hit by cyber attack, emails hacked

The mastermind and motive of the attack are unknown, but the British Parliament believes they have the technical capacity to prevent the incident.

Inside the meeting room of the British Parliament - Photo: AFP

On June 24, multiple sources reported that the British Parliament had suffered a cyber attack, leaving MPs unable to access their email boxes outside the Palace of Westminster (Parliament headquarters).

According to The Telegraph, many MPs received warnings about the attack on June 23 and were unable to access their mailboxes remotely on June 24.

Liberal Democrat MP Chris Rennard wrote on Twitter: “There has been a cyber attack at Westminster, emails may not work outside of Parliament.”

A spokesman for the UK House of Commons confirmed that the country's Parliament had discovered multiple unauthorized accesses to MPs' accounts.

"We have technical systems in place to protect the email accounts of MPs and staff in the UK Parliament and we are taking a range of steps to protect our email systems," the spokesman said.

The BBC quoted a spokesman for the British Parliament as saying that the reason MPs cannot remotely access emails from official accounts is because the agency has implemented protection measures.

Previously, many British media outlets reported that hackers were selling email passwords of many parliamentarians on the Internet.

Last month, many network management systems of agencies and units in the UK were infected with the WannaCry "ransomware" malware, causing many disruptions and forcing them to be shut down for processing.

According to TTO