Britain’s Ministry of Defence has been the target of a large-scale cyberattack and the personal information of UK military personnel has been hacked.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride told Sky News, which first reported the hack, that the attack was on a system run by an outside firm but was still a “very significant matter”.
It targeted a third-party payroll system used by the Defence Ministry and included the names and bank details of current and former service personnel of the armed forces, Sky News and the BBC reported.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said a “malign actor” has probably compromised the payments system. He wanted to reassure people that the Ministry of Defence has already taken the action of removing the network offline and making sure that people affected are supported in the right way.
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps told parliament that the government “cannot rule out state involvement.”
Tobias Ellwood, a former minister in the Conservative government, said the incident has the hallmarks of a Chinese cyberattack. Targeting the names of the payroll system and service personnel’s bank details, this does point to China because it can be as part of a plan, a strategy to see who might be coerced.
However, the government was not currently pointing the finger at Beijing.
The MoD [Ministry of Defence] has acted very swiftly to take this database offline. It’s a third-party database and certainly not one run directly by the MoD.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian said Beijing opposed all forms of cyberattacks and rejected any attempt to use the issue of hacking for political ends to smear other countries. Lin said that the remarks by relevant British politicians are utter nonsense.
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