- UK confirms October hack of Foreign Office system, data possibly stolen
- Risk to individuals considered low; The investigation continues, the attribution is unclear
- Chinese state actors are suspected but not officially confirmed
The UK government has confirmed speculation that classified government servers were hacked and accessed by threat actors raised by former chief adviser Dominic Cummings.
Reports assessed (as did Cummings) that Chinese state-sponsored threat actors broke into a British government system in October and possibly stole data such as visa information.
Now Trade Secretary Chris Bryant has confirmed the findings on BBC Breakfast but downplayed the importance of the hit. According to the BBC, a threat actor broke into a system run by the Foreign Office on behalf of the Home Office. The break-in was resolved “fairly quickly” and a more thorough investigation is currently underway.
Part of modern life
Bryant would not confirm or deny that it was a Chinese threat actor, saying investigators “simply don’t know yet” who is responsible.
He played down the importance of the individuals and insisted; “We believe it’s a fairly low risk that individuals have been compromised or affected.”
He also said that “government facilities are always going to be potentially targeted” and that investigators are now “working through the ramifications of what this is.”
“This is part of modern life that we have to tackle and deal with,” he concluded.
For years, government agencies and private cyber security organizations in the West warned of coordinated, organized and large-scale cyber attacks coming from China. Several threat actors, including Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, APT27, Mustang Panda, have reportedly targeted critical infrastructure, telecommunications companies, governments, think tanks and journalists in an attempt to disrupt key organizations and steal valuable information.
In his first term, the Trump administration even banned Huawei from building out the country’s 5G infrastructure, saying the Chinese government could force the company to install backdoors for wiretapping and cyber espionage.
China has always vehemently denied such accusations, claiming instead that the US is the world’s biggest “cyber bully”.
Via Pakinomist
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