Business minister Sir Chris Bryant refused to say whether a Chinese-linked group was responsible for the cyber attack.
The Government has said it is “pretty confident” visa applicants’ details have not been compromised in a hack of Foreign Office data, allegedly by a Chinese group.
Reports have claimed that a Beijing-linked cyber gang targeted Government servers two months ago, and had accessed information relating to visa details.
The Sun reported on Thursday night that “thousands” of confidential documents and data had been retrieved in the data breach.
The Sun said the Storm 1849 group was responsible for the hack in October.
The Chinese organisation was named publicly in March 2024 in connection with cyber attacks on MPs and the Electoral Commission.
However business minister Sir Chris Bryant refused to say whether a Chinese-linked group was behind it. He also told Times Radio that the wider reports were not completely true.
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 cyber attacks, it does take some time to get to the bottom of precisely what has happened, and I think the front page of The Sun is slightly over-egging the kind of details that are available at this stage.
“The one thing I do want to reassure people about is that in our initial investigation, we are pretty confident that no individual will be harmed. You said people’s visa applications might have been… I think that is speculating.”
A Government spokesperson said: “We have been working to investigate a cyber incident. We take the security of our systems and data extremely seriously.”
