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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shot, the spectator's daily politics podcast.

I'm Oscar Edmondson and I'm joined today by Katie Pauls and Matt Dathan,

home affairs editor at The Times.

Now this morning the UK's electoral watchdog, the electoral commission said that it had been

the victim of a complex cyber attack by hostile actors. Now Matt we don't know who these hostile

actors are but what do we know? Well we know that in August 2021 the electoral commission was hacked

by unknown hostile actors but it was only until October 2022 so 14 months later that the

electoral commission actually found out that they'd been hacked and it was only on Tuesday of

this week that they actually disclosed it publicly. So there's a lot of questions about why

it took them so long to find out the first place and secondly why it took them so long to reveal

this publicly. The electoral commission has disclosed that the hackers got access to the open

and closed register so that means that the names and addresses of everyone who has signed up

to the electoral poll and the electoral register from 2014 to 2022 had the names and addresses

accessed by hackers and potentially leaked online. There's a third register which is the

anonymous register. It's a very small number of people who have to remain completely anonymous

for security reasons or for reasons of there might be victims of domestic abuse but that

database was not hacked. What does this mean for everyday voters in the democratic process? Do

we think that is this going to put an end to conversations about evosing and things like that when

...