LONDON (Reuters) -Britain's Electoral Commission said on Tuesday it had been targeted in a complex cyber incident first identified last October, which involved its systems being accessed by "hostile actors."

The Electoral Commission is the independent body which oversees elections and regulates political finance in Britain.

"Hostile actors were active in our systems and had access to servers which held our email, control systems, and copies of the electoral registers," it said in a series of posts on social media platform X.

Much of the data in the registers - including the name and address of those registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and the names of overseas voters - was already in the public domain, the commission added.

The commission has worked with Britain's National Cyber Security Centre and external experts to investigate the incident and had since made improvements to the security of its IT systems, it said.

(Reporting by Sachin Ravikumar; editing by William James)