A third-party payroll system was reportedly hacked using names and banking details of military personnel.
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 Minister Mel Stride told Sky News, which first reported the hack, that the attack was on a system run by an external company but that it was still a “very significant matter”.
Sky News and the BBC reported that it targeted a third-party payroll system used by the Ministry of Defense and contained the names and bank details of current and former military personnel in the armed forces.
Defense Secretary Grant Shapps is expected to give further details to Parliament later in the day.
“The Ministry of Defense [Ministry of Defence] responded very quickly and took this database offline. It is a third-party database and certainly not one operated directly by the Ministry of Defense,” Stride told Sky. The ministry first discovered the cyber attack a few days ago.
Tobias Ellwood, a former Conservative government minister, said the incident had the hallmarks of a Chinese cyberattack.
“Targeting the names of the payroll system and the banking details of military personnel actually points to China because it may be part of a plan, a strategy to see who may be coerced,” the former said Soldier and former chair of a parliamentary defense committee told BBC Radio.
Meanwhile, Stride said the government is not pointing the finger at Beijing at this time.
“That’s an assumption… we’re not saying that at this point,” he added.
According to British media reports, Shapps is expected to confirm that an enemy state was the culprit, but the government is not expected to publicly name China.
China rejects claims as “complete nonsense”.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said Beijing rejects all forms of cyberattacks and opposes any attempt to use the issue of hacking for political purposes to defame other countries.
“The statements made by relevant British politicians are complete nonsense,” Lin said on Tuesday. “China has always firmly opposed and cracked down on all types of cyberattacks.
The two countries are increasingly at odds over the issue of hacking, with Britain saying in March that Chinese hackers and a Chinese company were behind two high-profile attacks in recent years – the attack on China-critical parliamentarians and an attack on the country’s election watchdog.
Relations are strained as Britain tries to strike a delicate balance between trying to neutralize security threats posed by China while maintaining or even increasing engagement in some areas such as trade, investment and climate change.
But concerns about suspected spying activities in Britain are growing, particularly ahead of a general election expected later this year, and some British politicians have become increasingly vocal about the threat they say China poses.