Foreign Office was victim of cyberattack – and we don't know who did it, minister admits

The UK Foreign Office was hacked in October, a minister has admitted, raising fears that thousands of confidential documents and data may have been compromised.

While ministers are “pretty confident” that visa applicants ’ details have not been accessed, they have admitted that they are not confident the identity of the hacker.

Sources told The Sun that the Storm 1849 group was responsible for the hack in October, a Chinese organisation that was named publicly in March 2024 in connection with cyberattacks on MPs and the Electoral Commission.

The newspaper reported “thousands” of confidential documents and data had been retrieved in the data breach .

Trade minister Sir Chris Bryant admitted that there “certainly has been a hack ”, but he refused to say whether a Chinese -linked group was behind it, claiming that the wider reports were not completely true.

Speaking to Times Radio, Sir Chris said: “I’m actually going to take some of the details that you’ve just put out there off the table, because I’m not sure that they’re necessarily accurate.

“You just referred to potentially affecting thousands of visas. We are very confident that in the investigation that we’ve done so far, that nobody, no individual, will have been harmed or compromised by what has happened.

“There certainly has been a hack , I can say that, I’m not able to say whether it is directly related to Chinese operatives or indeed the Chinese state.”

He added: “We’ve been engaged in an investigation since October, just as with [Jaguar Land Rover] and M&S, and the British Library and a whole series of other cyberattacks, it does take some time to get to the bottom of precisely what has happened.”

The latest reports come amid ongoing disquiet following the collapse of a Chinese spying case and warnings by MI5 of the threat posed by the communist state to UK national security, fuelling the government’s difficulties as it seeks to ease tensions with Beijing.

And last week, the parliamentary intelligence watchdog issued a stark warning over the threat posed by China , saying the government must stop “dragging its heels” over whether to add the country to the enhanced tier of its threat regime .

A government spokesperson said: “We have been working to investigate a cyber incident. We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously.”