United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has reportedly been hacked by an unnamed threat actor, compromising the sensitive data of the nation's military personnel. 

The Ministry of Defence's payroll system, which was the target of the breach, held the names and bank account details of both active and retired military personnel. In extremely rare cases, personal addresses could be contained in the data.

The hacker's identity and the data's potential uses are unknown. The information is referred to as "personal HMRC-style information," spans several years, and pertains to both active and retired members of the Royal Navy, Army, and Air Force.

An outside contractor oversaw the system; no operational MoD data was gathered. Initial inquiries by multiple sources revealed no proof that any data had been erased.

The defense secretary, Grant Shapps, is reportedly scheduled to make a statement in the afternoon following the Tuesday Commons debate.

(Photo: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Ministers have reportedly blamed unfriendly and malicious parties, but they will not identify the nation responsible for the cyberattack.

As a precaution, affected service staff will be notified and given expert guidance. To find out if their information is being used or if there is an effort to use it, affected citizens can contact a personal data protection service.

There should be no problems with the upcoming payday at the end of this month, as all salaries were paid at the previous one. However, there might be a short delay in paying costs in a few instances.

John Healy, the shadow defense secretary, said there were many pertinent questions the defense secretary should be asking about the alleged data breach, particularly from military people whose information was compromised.

According to reports, authorities have discovered the attack recently and are attempting to determine its scope. It might make people wonder if friends who have tense relations with China would want to provide the UK access to critical intelligence.

Read Also: World's First: UK to Officially Ban Weak Passwords 

China's Cyberattacks Against UK

Less than two months have passed since the government held two "malicious" cyberattacks on British territory accountable, blaming China's "state-affiliated actors."

The United Kingdom and Britain have accused hackers with ties to China of being the primary culprits behind two cyberattacks that have been detected: one in October 2022 and the other in the summer of 2021. 

According to British Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, at the time, Chinese state-affiliated companies were allegedly responsible for two hostile cyber operations directed towards parliamentarians and democratic institutions.

Dowden connected the attack to the Electoral Commission, an impartial body tasked with creating rules governing how the U.K. There should be elections to a Chinese-affiliated state actor. The campaigns were reported to have taken place in 2021 and 2022. According to Reuters, Britain has not yet identified the hacker, even though the hack was made public last year.

Although the Electoral Commission discovered the attack in October 2022, it was not made public until last year. In 2023, the Commission declared that every British voter registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 had their identities and addresses compromised by hackers.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, the two events involved targeted attacks on MPs who had pushed the government to adopt a more assertive posture against China and an attack on the Electoral Commission in 2021, which is in charge of monitoring elections and political financing.

UK vs. State-Affiliated Hackers

Reiterating the same demands, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith told other sources that the latest cyberattack against the UK's MoD is yet another instance of why the UK government needs to acknowledge that China is a systemic threat to the country and adjust the integrated review to take that into account.

According to Duncan Smith, it is a hostile player that collaborates with Iran and North Korea to form a new axis of totalitarian regimes while providing financial and military support to Russia. 

Related Article: Massive Data Breach in Australian Facial Recognition System Raises Alarm 

(Photo: Tech Times)