UK government confirms official data was stolen in hacking

The UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office FCDO was hacked in October 2025 and the official data was stolen in a recent hacking attack.

The British trade minister Chris Bryant informed that the government’s official data has been hacked in October, partly confirming a report in the Sun newspaper, which said a Chinese group had breached systems ‌to access Foreign Office data.

"There certainly has been a hack," Bryant told Times Radio on Friday December 19,2025,"I'm not ‌able to say whether it is directly related to Chinese operatives or, indeed, the Chinese state," he added.

As reported by BBC, the hacked data is understood to have been on systems operated on the Home Office's behalf by the Foreign Office, whose staff detected the incident.

In addition to that, The Sun named ‘Storm 1849’ as the ‘Chinese cyber gang’ responsible for the breach that possibly included tens of ⁠thousands of visa details.

Bryant said ‌that the reporting around the incident was "speculation" and that the government was continuing to investigate, but at this stage it was "fairly ‍confident" that there was a low risk any individual would be affected.

"We managed to close the hole, as it were, very quickly," Bryant told news outlets, describing the breach. "It was a technical issue in one of our sites."

While the Sun newspaper said the ‌group, Storm 1849, was a China-linked gang which was part of a state-aligned hacking apparatus and that has been accused of targeting politicians and groups critical of the Chinese government.

Moreover, the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said earlier in December that China has posed “national security threats to Britain” but defended his government’s decision to step up engagement with the country.

According to sources, Starmer is due to visit Beijing in late January 2026.

The incident at the Foreign Office follows two major cyberattacks on big British companies this year.

The heinous hack forced the country's largest carmaker, Jaguar ‍Land Rover, to shut ⁠down production for five weeks, while retailer Marks & Spencer suspended online orders for six weeks.

UK intelligence agencies have warned about increasing, large-scale espionage from China, using cyber and other means, and targeting commercial and political information.

Upon asking for additional details about the October hack, the UK Foreign Office said ⁠that it had been working to investigate further about that cyber incident.

"We take the security of our systems ‌and data extremely seriously," a government spokesperson said.