The British government has opened an investigation into a hack which, according to the tabloid ‘Daily Mail’, gave access to the identities of around 100 potential British army recruits, possibly for the benefit of Russia, a secretary of state announced on Tuesday.
According to the “Daily Mail”, the identity of 124 candidates wishing to join the army was discovered illegally.
“I know that my colleague Leo Docherty, undersecretary of defense “who deals with recruitment, has requested an urgent review of the security of our computer system,” the secretary of state said. to the Armed Forces James Heappey, on LBC radio.
“It seems like a very strange intelligence target, given that it would target newly trained soldiers,” he added, “I would have thought the Kremlin would have higher intelligence targets than that.”
The case comes as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, which form the “Five Eyes” alliance, recently warned that their intelligence services had information according to which Russia was preparing to launch massive cyberattacks against Ukraine’s allies.
Asked about the statements of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who warned of the “real danger of a third world war”, James Heappey stressed that the reason for the war in Ukraine is that “Russia has crossed the borders of a sovereign country and began to invade its territory”.
“NATO is not an expansionist alliance” but a “defensive alliance”, he continued, “all this noise from Moscow that their attack on Ukraine is a response to NATO aggression is simply absurd”.