Chinese hackers allegedly accessed confidential data held by the Foreign Office in a cyber attack, it has emerged.
A cyber gang known as Storm-1849 is said to have targeted government servers in October and accessed personal information which could have included visa details, The Sun reported.
A Government spokesman confirmed it was investigating the “cyber incident”, telling the paper: “We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously.”
Business minister Sir Chris Bryant confirmed there had been a hack but said he was not able to say “whether it is directly related to Chinese operatives or indeed the Chinese state”.
He said the Government was “very confident that in the investigation that we’ve done so far, that nobody, no individual will have been harmed or compromised by what has happened”.
He added: “We’ve been engaged in an investigation since October, just as with (Jaguar Land Rover) and M&S, and the British Library and a whole series of other cyber attacks, it does take some time to get to the bottom of precisely what has happened.”
He added that a suggestion over whether the hackers had gained access to visa details was “speculation”.
The hack is likely to fuel growing concerns about malign Chinese activity in Britain following the collapse of a spy trial and controversy over plans for a new Chinese embassy in central London. The Government was accused of “dragging its heels” over whether to classify China as an enhanced-tier threat by Parliament’s intelligence watchdog.
Storm-1849 is a China-linked espionage group identified by Western agencies as being part of Beijing’s state-aligned hacking apparatus.
The group has been accused of targeting politicians, parliamentary staff and organisations critical of the Chinese government, using phishing emails and cloud access to harvest sensitive political information.
Storm-1849 was named publicly in March 2024 when the Government formally blamed China for cyber attacks on MPs and the Electoral Commission.
The UK’s election watchdog said it took three years and £250,000 to recover from the hack, which saw details of 40 million voters accessed by Beijing’s spies.
This latest cyber incident comes as Sir Keir Starmer is due to make a historic visit to China in late January to strengthen economic ties with Beijing.
