- Dominic Cummings claimed Chinese cyber spies had accessed classified British systems for years, including ‘Strap’ data
- The Cabinet Office and cybersecurity experts have strongly denied any breach or investigation.
- The allegations sparked a debate; Cummings offered to testify if Parliament opens an inquiry
For “many years,” Chinese cyberspies resided in high-level British security systems, obtaining “vast quantities” of classified government information, says Dominic Cummings, a British political strategist who served as chief adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
This claim made waves across the UK, prompting a swift denial from the Cabinet Office – not everyone agreed with him.
In an interview with The Times, Cummings said the Chinese had hacked the high-level systems used to transfer “Strap,” documents and information deemed highly sensitive or classified. He says he was informed of the breach, along with Prime Minister Johnson, in 2020.
Lots of skepticism
The leaked information included “documents from the intelligence services, documents from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office”, he added.
“What I’m saying is that some elements of Strap have been compromised and large amounts of data classified as top secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control has been compromised. Things that the government has to keep secret. If it’s not secret, then that has very, very serious implications.”
At the same time, a report in The spectator said the Cabinet Office had ordered an investigation into a breach, after Beijing allegedly bought a company that controlled a data center that some Whitehall departments used to store classified data.
But not everyone agrees with what Cummings says. A Cabinet Office spokesperson said “the claim that the systems we use to transfer the most sensitive information have been compromised” was false. The telegraph reported.
Professor Ciaran Martin (former director general of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre) told Radio 4 that these claims were, to his knowledge, “categorically false”: “It would have been for the National Cyber Security Center to lead and there was no such investigation. » BBC Martin was quoted as saying.
“China poses a continuing and serious threat to cybersecurity… but these systems are entirely different,” he added. “They are built, monitored, secured and operated in a completely different way than normal Internet-based systems. This is not to say that… they [China] can somehow penetrate these completely tailor-made systems and there was no evidence as of 2020 that they did so. »
Cummings added that if MPs wish to investigate the matter, he would be “happy to talk about it”.
Via Bloomberg
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