UK Foreign Office Subjected to “Serious Cybersecurity Incident”

The UK’s Foreign Place of work was the goal of “a serious cybersecurity incident,” according to a doc accidentally published on a federal government website.

The BBC reported that the tender doc discovered that unknown hackers infiltrated International, Commonwealth and Enhancement Office environment (FCDO) systems, but have been detected. It extra that cybersecurity company BAE Units Used Intelligence was identified as to offer “urgent support” for “remediation and investigation,” for which it was paid out a lot more than £467,000. This contract, which was awarded with out aggressive tender because of to the “extreme urgency” of the problem, finished on January 12 2022.

There ended up number of other particulars supplied about the incident, which includes when it took location. Even so, it is not thought that the hackers received any delicate or labeled data. The tender document has due to the fact been eliminated from the web-site.

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The BBC quoted a FCDO spokesperson as declaring: “We do not comment on security but have units in place to detect and defend from likely cyber incidents.”

There are problems the incident may well have been aspect of a cyber-espionage campaign created to access labeled govt files. Past yr, data from Microsoft found that Russia accounted for the bulk of condition-sponsored attacks from July 2020 to June 2021, with the SolarWinds attackers dominating threat exercise. The SolarWinds campaign alone compromised at least nine US government departments.

Final thirty day period, the Countrywide Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned UK organizations to prepare for Russian cyber-attacks amid the ongoing geopolitical crisis in Ukraine.