A third-party payroll system with names and bank details of armed forces personnel was reportedly hacked.
The British Ministry of Defense has been the target of a large-scale cyber attack, a government minister confirmed to British media.
On Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride told Sky News, which first reported the attack, that the attack occurred on a system run by an external company, but that it remained a “very serious matter.” important”.
It targeted a third-party payroll system used by the Ministry of Defense and included the names and bank details of current and former serving personnel in the armed forces, Sky News and the BBC reported.
Defense Secretary Grant Shapps is expected to provide more details to parliament later in the day.
“The Ministry of Defense [Ministry of Defence] has acted very quickly to take this database offline. “It is a third-party database and certainly not one run directly by the MoD,” Stride told Sky. The ministry first discovered the cyberattack several days ago.
Tobias Ellwood, a former Conservative government minister, said the incident had the hallmarks of a Chinese cyberattack.
“By focusing on the names in the payroll system and the banking details of service personnel, this points to China because it may be part of a plan, a strategy to see who can be coerced,” said the former soldier and former president of a parliamentary defense committee. the committee told BBC Radio.
Meanwhile, Stride said the government was not pointing the finger at Beijing.
“That's an assumption… we're not saying that right now,” he added.
Shapps is due to confirm that a hostile state was to blame, according to British media reports, but the government is not expected to publicly name China.
China refutes claims as 'absolutely absurd'
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Beijing opposes all forms of cyber attacks and rejects any attempts to use the issue of hacking for political purposes to smear other countries.
“The comments from relevant British politicians are complete nonsense,” Lin said on Tuesday. “China has always firmly opposed and cracked down on all types of cyber attacks.
The two countries have increasingly clashed over the issue of hacking, with Britain saying in March that Chinese hackers and a Chinese entity were behind two high-profile attacks in recent years: the attack on parliamentarians critical of China and an assault on the country's elections. guard dog.
It has strained ties as Britain sought to strike a delicate balance between trying to neutralize security threats posed by China while maintaining or even improving engagement in some areas such as trade, investment and climate change.
But there has been growing anxiety about his alleged spy activity in Britain, particularly ahead of a general election due later this year, and some British politicians have become increasingly vocal about the threat they say China poses.
