Secret information and classified UK government servers potentially accessed by Chinese hackers for over a decade

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Chief Adviser to former PM Boris Johnson made some wild accusations

Flags of the People's Republic of China, hanging in a park during National Day in Beijing, China
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
  • Dominic Cummings claimed Chinese cyberspies accessed classified UK systems for years, including “Strap” data
  • The Cabinet Office and cybersecurity experts strongly denied any breach or investigation occurred
  • Allegations sparked debate; Cummings offered to testify if Parliament launches an inquiry

For “many years”, Chinese cyberspies were dwelling in UK high-level security systems, obtaining “vast amounts” of classified government information, claims Dominic Cummings, British political strategist who served as Chief Adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

This claim sent ripples throughout the UK, prompting a swift denial by the Cabinet Office - not everyone agrees with him.

In an interview with the Times, Cummings said that the Chinese breached high-level systems used to transfer “Strap” - documents and information deemed highly sensitive, or classified. He says he was briefed about the breach, together with Prime Minister Johnson, back in 2020.

Plenty of skepticism

The breached information included “material from intelligence services, material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office,” he added.

"What I'm saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised. Things the government has to keep secret. If they're not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it."

At the same time, a report in The Spectator said that the Cabinet Office ordered a breach be investigated, after Beijing allegedly bought a company that controlled a data hub that certain Whitehall departments used to store classified data.

But, not everyone agrees with what Cummings is saying. A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said that the “claim that the systems we use to transfer the most sensitive information have been compromised” were untrue, The Telegraph reported.

Professor Ciaran Martin (former chief executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre) told Radio 4 that the claims were, to the best of his knowledge, “categorically untrue”: "That would have fallen to the National Cyber Security Centre to lead and there was no such investigation," BBC cited Martin saying.

"China is a consistent and serious cyber security threat… but these systems are entirely different,” he added. “They're built, monitored, secured, and operated in an entirely different way than normal internet-based systems. It doesn't follow that… they [China] can somehow penetrate these entirely bespoke systems and there wasn't any evidence in 2020 that they did so."

Cummings added that if the MPs want to have an inquiry about it, he would be “happy to talk about it”.

Via Bloomberg

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Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.

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