Third-party payroll system with military personnel’s names and banking details hacked, reports say.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense has been the target of a large-scale cyber attack, a government minister has confirmed to British media.
On Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride told Sky News, which first reported the hack, that the attack took place on a system run by an external company but was still a “very significant matter”.
It targeted a third-party payroll system used by the Ministry of Defense and included the names and bank details of current and former armed forces personnel, Sky News and the BBC reported.
Defense Secretary Grant Shapps is expected to provide further details to parliament later in the day.
“The modification [Ministry of Defence] acted very quickly to take this database offline. It is a third-party database and is certainly not managed directly by the Ministry of Defense,” Stride told Sky. The ministry first discovered the cyber attack several days ago.
Tobias Ellwood, a former Conservative government minister, said the incident had the hallmarks of a Chinese cyber attack.
“Targeting the payroll system names and bank details of service personnel, it points to China because it could 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 told BBC radio.
Meanwhile, Stride said the government was not currently pointing the finger at Beijing.
“That’s an assumption… we’re not saying that right now,” he added.
Shapps is expected 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 “absurd”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Beijing opposes all forms of cyber attacks and rejected any attempt to use the hacking issue for political purposes to defame other countries.
“The remarks of relevant British politicians are completely absurd,” Lin said on Tuesday. “China has always firmly opposed and cracked down on all types of cyber attacks.
The two countries have increasingly sparred 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 attack on the country’s electoral system. security dog.
Ties have been strained as the UK has sought to strike a delicate balance between trying to neutralize the security threats posed by China while maintaining or even strengthening engagement in some areas such as trade, investment and climate change.
But there has been growing anxiety about its alleged spying activity in Britain, especially ahead of general elections due later this year, and some British politicians have become increasingly vocal about the threat they say China poses. .
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
