The UK Foreign Office was hacked in October, a minister has admitted, raising fears that thousands of confidential documents and data may have been compromised.
While ministers are “pretty confident” that visa applicants’ details have not been accessed, they have admitted that they are not confident about the identity of the hacker.
Sources told The Sun that the group responsible for the hack in October was Storm 1849, a Chinese organisation that was named publicly in March 2024 in connection with cyber attacks on MPs and the Electoral Commission.
The newspaper reported “thousands” of confidential documents and data had been retrieved in the data breach.
Trade minister Sir Chris Bryant admitted that there “certainly has been a hack”, but he refused to say whether a Chinese-linked group was behind it, claiming that the wider reports were not completely true.
Speaking to Times Radio, Sir Chris said: “I’m actually going to take some of the details that you’ve just put out there off the table, because I’m not sure that they’re necessarily accurate.
“You just referred to potentially affecting thousands of visas. We are very confident that in the investigation that we’ve done so far, that nobody, no individual, will have been harmed or compromised by what has happened.
“There certainly has been a hack, I can say that, I’m not able to say whether it is directly related to Chinese operatives or indeed the Chinese state.”
He added: “We’ve been engaged in an investigation since October, just as with [Jaguar Land Rover] and M&S, and the British Library and a whole series of other cyber attacks, it does take some time to get to the bottom of precisely what has happened.”
News of the hack comes just weeks before the PM is due to visit China.
Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel accused the government of turning “a blind eye to China’s targeting of the UK and the national security threat China’s autocratic regime poses to our country. From spies at the heart of Whitehall, to foreign interference, to the repression and human rights violations against Jimmy Lai and BN(O)s [British nationals (overseas)], to the unacceptable Chinese super spy hub Labour is supporting, Labour have shown a total inability to stand up to China. Starmer is putting Britain at risk and his pursuit of closer ties with Beijing is a clear threat to our security. If this data hack was carried out by China, he must act.”
The latest reports come amid ongoing disquiet following the collapse of a Chinese spying case and warnings by MI5 of the threat posed by the communist state to UK national security, fuelling the government’s difficulties as it seeks to ease tensions with Beijing.
Only last week, the parliamentary intelligence watchdog issued a stark warning over the threat posed by China, saying the government must stop “dragging its heels” over whether to add the country to the enhanced tier of its threat regime.
A government spokesperson said: “We have been working to investigate a cyber incident. We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously.”
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