The foreign secretary has said there is “plenty of evidence” that Russia has the ability to disrupt British politics with cyber-attacks following reports that intelligence officials are to brief political parties on how to defend against hacking from Moscow.

Boris Johnson, due to meet his Russian counterpart in the coming weeks, said there was no doubt Moscow had been up to “all sorts of dirty tricks” in relation to political interference.

Johnson accused Moscow of bringing down French TV stations, hacking the US Democratic National Convention, and suggested it might have engineered an attempted assassination of Montenegro’s prime minister.

The former London mayor’s comments follow a Sunday Times report that said GCHQ had written to Britain’s major political parties with advice on how to block hacking.

Security sources say GCHQ regards protecting the political system from foreign hackers as “priority work”, according to the paper.

Speaking to Peston on Sunday, Johnson said: “We have no evidence the Russians are actually involved in trying to undermine our democratic processes at the moment. We don’t actually have that evidence. But what we do have is plenty of evidence that the Russians are capable of doing that.”

The GCHQ letter, written by the chief executive of its National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin, warned the main political parties that their internal databases of voters’ views and personal information collected during campaigns, as well as internal emails, could be at risk.



Seminars will be held to educate politicians on the threat from the Kremlin after its spies were accused of carrying out cyber-attacks with the intention of influencing US and German elections.

Martin wrote: “You will be aware of the coverage of events in the United States, Germany and elsewhere reminding us of the potential for hostile action against the UK political system. This is not just about the network security of political parties’ own systems. Attacks against our democratic processes go beyond this and can include attacks on parliament, constituency offices, thinktanks and pressure groups and individuals’ email accounts.”

In a statement Martin said: “Protecting the UK’s political system from hostile cyber-activity is one of our operational priorities, so we have signposted parties to existing guidance and will deliver tailored seminars on cyber-security measures.

“The seminars will build on our existing advice and will provide an overview of threats, case studies on recent cyber-incidents, practical steps to reduce the risk and advice on incident management.”

Asked about the threat on Sunday, Johnson said: “There is no doubt that they have been up to all sorts of dirty tricks – bringing down French TV stations; you have seen what happened in the United States where there is no question at all they were involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Convention. You have seen what happened in Montenegro, where there was an attempted coup in a European state and possibly even an attempted assassination of the leader of that state.”

He added: “There is very little doubt that the Russians are behind these things, to say nothing of what they have done in Ukraine.”



The Speaker of the Commons John Bercow’s Commission on Digital Democracy has called for secure online voting to be an option for all voters by the 2020 UK general election. However, in January, a former head of MI6 warned against the UK moving to an electronic voting system owing to fears of international cyber warfare.

John Sawers, the head of MI6 from 2009 until 2014, said in a BBC Radio 4 documentary, The New World: Axis of Power: “We need to have systems which are robust … The only trouble is, the younger generation of people expect to be able to do things remotely and through electronic devices.

“Bizarrely the stubby pencil and piece of paper that you put your cross on in the ballot box is actually much more secure than anything which is electronic.”

In February, Martin warned that 188 high-level cyber-attacks, “many of which threatened national security”, had struck Britain in the previous three months.



Philip Hammond, the chancellor and former defence and foreign secretary, said the NCSC had been blocking potential attacks on government departments and the public at a rate of about 200 hacks a day.

US intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of breaching Democratic National Committee computers in an attempt to interfere with the presidential election won by Donald Trump. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said in December that Russia was trying to influence federal elections with “increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage”.