MPs call for inquiry into Russian cyber-attacks

Downing Street is facing calls for an inquiry after it revealed Russian state spies have targeted MPs, peers, civil servants and journalists with cyberattacks for the last eight years and were behind a hack that influenced the 2019 election.

- Rowena Mason, Andrew Roth

The government summoned the Russian ambassador yesterday to admonish Moscow over "sustained" attempts to meddle in UK politics since 2015. As a result, the Foreign Office imposed sanctions 40 on two members of a hacking group called Star Blizzard, one of whom is named as a Federal Security Service (FSB) officer.

Leo Docherty, a Foreign Office minister, said many of the hundreds of cyber-attacks on MPs, peers and others had been unsuccessful, but he identified two hacks in 2018 and 2019 that the government now believed were carried out by Star Blizzard.

Docherty told parliament that the group linked to the FSB was behind the leak of US-UK trade talk papers in 2019. These are believed to have been obtained in a phishing attack on the email account of the former trade secretary Liam Fox. The leaked document, published online, was used by Labour in the 2019 election to show that the NHS was "on the table" in US trade talks.

The Foreign Office also said Star Blizzard was behind a 2018 hack on a government-backed thinktank called the Institute for Statecraft. Documents apparently leaked as part of the hack led to suggestions that the institute had been amplifying social media critical of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. At the time, the Foreign Office said it had investigated and found no systemic bias at the thinktank, while blaming a Russian operation to discredit the organisation.