LONDON, Dec 19: UK’s trade department minister Chris Bryant said the government had been hacked in October, partly confirming a report in the Sun newspaper, which said a group had breached systems to access Foreign Office data.
“There certainly has been a hack,” Bryant told Times Radio on Friday.
“I’m not able to say whether it is directly related to Chinese operatives, or indeed, the Chinese state,” he added.
The Sun named Storm 1849 as the cyber gang responsible for the breach, which it said was understood to possibly include tens of thousands of visa details.
Bryant said that the reporting around the incident was “speculation” and that the government was continuing to investigate, but at this stage it was “fairly confident” that there was a low risk any individual would be affected.
“We managed to close the hole, as it were, very quickly,” Bryant told Sky News, describing the breach. “It was a technical issue in one of our sites.”
The Sun newspaper said the group, Storm 1849, was a gang which was part of a China-aligned hacking apparatus, and which has been accused of targeting politicians and groups critical of the Chinese government.
The incident at the Foreign Office follows two major cyber-attacks on big British companies this year.
Hacks forced the country’s largest car maker, Jaguar Land Rover, to shut down production for five weeks, while retailer Marks & Spencer suspended online orders for six weeks.
Asked for details of the incident, the foreign office said that it had been working to investigate a cyber incident.
“We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously,” a government spokesperson said.