We've just seen deputy PM Oliver Dowden tells MPs that China is responsible for “malicious cyber campaigns” targeting the Electoral Commission and MPs.
The sheer size of this hack on the Electoral Commission was eye watering – 40 million people affected. But as ever with cyber-attacks, it’s the quality of data that’s more important than quantity.
On that metric it was still one of the most significant hacks in history for the British public.
Databases containing the names and addresses of all registered voters were able to be read and copied by hackers.
The Electoral Commission played it down at the time arguing that the data was already "largely in the public domain". However, it transpired that more than half of the data – so tens of millions of records weren’t publicly available at all.
So make no mistake – this could have put a vast amount of private data into the hands of cyber criminals (we still don’t know if they actually did access them).
However, due to the nature of this hack – for espionage, not money – the accessed data of the general public is probably less important to Chinese cyber spies. It’s likely that having been able to read the toing and froing of sensitive emails between election officials for over a year during six by-elections would have been far more valuable.