- Dominic Cummings claimed Chinese cyber spies accessed classified UK systems for years, including ‘Strap’ data
- The Cabinet Office and cybersecurity experts strongly denied that any breach or investigation had occurred.
- The accusations sparked debate; Cummings offered to testify if Parliament launches investigation
For “many years,” Chinese cyber spies lodged themselves in the U.K.’s high-level security systems, obtaining “large amounts” of classified government information, says Dominic Cummings, a British political strategist who served as a senior adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
This claim had repercussions across the UK, prompting a swift denial from the Cabinet Office; Not everyone agrees with him.
In an interview with the Times, Cummings said the Chinese breached high-level systems used to transfer “Strap,” documents and information considered highly confidential or classified. He says he was informed of the breach, along with Prime Minister Johnson, back in 2020.
a lot of skepticism
The leaked information included “material from the intelligence services, material from the Secretary of Homeland Security in the Cabinet Office,” he added.
“What I’m saying is that some things on Strap were compromised and large amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised. Things that the government has to keep secret. If they’re not secret, then they have very, very serious implications.”
At the same time, a report in The spectator said the Cabinet Office ordered a breach investigation, after Beijing allegedly bought a company that controlled a data center that certain 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 not true. The telegraph reported.
Professor Ciaran Martin (former chief executive of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre) told Radio 4 that the claims were, as far as he knew, “categorically false”: “That would have fallen to the National Cyber Security Center and there was no such investigation.” bbc he quoted Martin as saying.
“China is a constant and serious threat to cybersecurity… but these systems are completely different,” he added. “They are built, monitored, protected and operated in a completely different way than normal Internet-based systems. It does not follow that… [China] “They can somehow penetrate these fully customized systems and there was no evidence in 2020 that they did.”
Cummings added that if MPs want to hold an inquiry into it, he would be “happy to talk about it”.
Through Bloomberg
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