Six-year-old installs keylogger on MP's computer

 

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Posted on 26 Mar 2007 at 13:07

A six-year-old girl has successfully hacked into the UK Parliament's computer system, installing a keylogger onto an MPs 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.

Author: Simon Aughton