The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was hacked in October, the minister Chris Bryant has said.
Bryant, a trade minister in Keir Starmer’s government, told Sky News there was a low risk to “any individual” from the cyber-attack.
Details of the hack emerged on Friday in a report by the Sun that claimed a Chinese hacker group was behind the cyber-attack.
However, Bryant told broadcasters it was “not clear” who perpetrated the attack and cautioned against speculation. “There certainly has been a hack at the FCDO and we’ve been aware of that since October,” Bryant told Sky News.
“And just as you will have been reporting earlier on this year on the cyber hack at JLR [Jaguar Land Rover] and at Marks & Spencer, and earlier last year, I think it was at the British Library, all of these are really important things for us to tackle and be aware of and prevent wherever possible.
“Some of the reporting has, I think, been a bit more speculation than accurate.”
Bryant said: “Quite often the investigation takes quite a long time to get down to that. We managed to close the hole, as it were, very quickly. There was a technical issue in one of our sites, I gather, and we’re fairly confident that there’s a low risk of any individual actually being affected by this.
“I know that some of the reports have said potentially various things could happen. I think that’s a bit more speculation than is helpful. So I don’t want to scaremonger about this. We are on top of it. And also, it’s not entirely clear where this has come from. I know everybody’s speculating about that as well. It’s that that is not entirely clear either.”
Asked if China was behind the attack, Bryant said: “That’s not entirely clear.”
The Sun named Storm 1849 as the Chinese cyber gang responsible for the breach, which it said was understood to possibly include tens of thousands of visa details.
The group has been “accused of targeting politicians and groups critical of the Chinese government”, the newspaper said.
A government spokesperson told the Guardian: “We have been working to investigate a cyber incident. We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously.”
