A child aged just six has successfully hacked into the UK Parliament's computer system, installing a keylogger onto an MP's machine.
Guildford MP Anne Milton agreed to leave her computer unattended for 60 seconds as part of a test of House of Commons IT security by the BBC's Inside Out programme.
Brianagh, a schoolgirl from Winchester, took just a quarter of that time to install the keylogging software without being noticed. Such easily available applications record all the keystrokes made on a machine and can therefore be used to steal passwords, financial data and personal information.
Everything that Milton would have typed for the next six months would have been secretly recorded and it would only have taken a few seconds to retrieve the software and all the confidential information it had gathered, including the password for the whole computer.
"It really surprises me," Milton told Inside Out.
"It's the speed, the size of the device and the ease with which it was attached to my computer."
The House of Commons administration declined to comment.
-
Why patching velocity matters as Claude Mythos supercharges vulnerability discoveryFrontier AI models such as Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5 make patching more urgent than ever. How can firms increase the velocity at which they apply fixes and mitigations?
-
The UK is running on fumes as data center build-outs can’t keep pace with demandNews The country's vacancy rate has dropped sharply, with much of the pipeline early-stage and uncertain
