Successful Cyber Attacks Against MPs

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Jul 9, 2015) – An investigation conducted in London has shown the ease with which personal data can be hacked when the target is using public Wi-Fi. Security and privacy software company F-Secure teamed up with penetration testing expertMandalorian Security Services and the Cyber Security Research Institute to conduct the test — in this case, hacking into the devices of three politicians.

The politicians, deliberately selected from the most powerful chambers in UK politics, were Rt. Hon. David Davis MP, Mary Honeyball MEP and Lord Strasburger. The exercise was carried out with the permission of the politicians who, despite holding important positions within the different parliaments, admitted that they had received no formal training or information about the relative ease with which computers can be breached while using public Wi-Fi, a service they all admitted to using regularly.

In the case of Lord Strasburger, a Voice over IP (VoIP) call he made from a hotel room was intercepted and recorded using technology freely available on the Internet, and relatively easy to master.

Mary Honeyball MEP, who sits on the EU committee responsible for the ‘We Love Wi-Fi’ campaign, was browsing the Internet in a café when the ethical hacker sent her a message, seemingly from Facebook, which invited her to log back into her account, as it had timed out. This was how she unwittingly gave her login credentials to the hacker, who then accessed her Facebook account.

Extracts accredited to SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Jul 9, 2015)