Ministers ‘pretty confident’ visa details not compromised in Foreign Office hack
The government said it was “fairly confident” that visa applicants’ information had not been compromised in a State Department data hack as claimed by a Chinese group.
Reports claimed that a Beijing-linked cyber gang targeted Government servers two months ago and accessed information on visa details.
The Sun reported Thursday night that “thousands” of confidential documents and data were compromised in the data breach.
The Sun said the Storm 1849 group was responsible for the attack in October.
The name of the Chinese organization was made public in March 2024 in connection with cyber attacks on MPs and the Electoral Commission.
But business secretary Sir Chris Bryant refused to say whether a China-linked group was behind it. He also told Times Radio that wider reports were not entirely accurate.
Sir Chris said: “I’m actually going to take some of the details you’ve just put out off the table because I’m not sure they’re quite accurate.
“You just mentioned that potentially thousands of visas will be affected. From our investigation so far, we are extremely confident that no one, no individual will be harmed or endangered by what has happened.”
“There was definitely a hack, I can say that, I can’t say whether it was directly related to Chinese agents or the Chinese state.”
He added: “Just as with (Jaguar Land Rover) and M&S, the British Library and a number of other cyberattacks, we have been carrying out an investigation since October, it is taking some time to work out exactly what happened and I think The Sun’s front page is slightly exaggerating the details available at this stage.
“The only thing I want to reassure people is that from our initial investigation we are pretty confident that no individuals will be harmed. You said people may have visa applications… I think that’s speculation.”
A Government spokesman said: “We are working to investigate a cyber incident. We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously.”
