Was referendum vote site hacked by foreign agents?

THE Brexit referendum may have been hit by a cyber attack from one of the UK’s enemies, MPs warned last night.

The Commons public administration committee declared the crash of the official voter registration website just days before the June 23 vote may have been organised by foreign agents.

It said it was ‘ deeply concerned about the allegations of foreign interference’ in last year’s Brexit vote.

While the MPs did not identify who may have been responsible, it noted that both Russia and China use an approach to cyber attacks based on an understanding of mass psychology and of how to exploit indi- viduals. The warning comes amid repeated claims that Russia has sought to interfere in foreign elections, including last year’s US presidential election.

The official voter registration website crashed on June 7 last year, just hours before the deadline for people to sign up to vote in the referendum.

Ministers controversially extended the deadline for people to sign up to vote by 48 hours, even though the website had only been down for a much shorter period.

The Government said at the time that it was the result of an unprecedented spike in demand, with more than 500,000 people trying to register on the final day. However, the committee said the crash had indications of being a so- called distributed denial of service attack (DDOS), which would overwhelm the website.

It said while the incident had no material effect on the outcome of the referendum, it was crucial that lessons were learned for future votes.

The committee also called on the government, its listening post GCHQ and new government Cyber Security Centre to do more to protect citizens from online security attacks.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: ‘There is no evidence to suggest malign intervention. We conducted a full review into the outage and have applied the lessons learned.’