A "serious incident" compelled the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom to seek immediate cybersecurity assistance. A recently released public tender document confirmed the incident. According to a document released on February 4, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) sought "urgent business support" from its cybersecurity contractor, BAE Applied Intelligence,
The FCDO paid the company £467,325.60 — about $630,000 — for its services after issuing a contract for "business analyst and technical architect support to assess an authority cyber security incident" on January 12, 2022, according to the notice.
However, the incident's facts, which had not previously been made public, remain unknown.
The document stated, “The Authority was the target of a serious cyber security incident, details of which cannot be disclosed. In response to this incident, urgent support was required to support remediation and investigation. Due to the urgency and criticality of the work, the Authority was unable to comply with the time limits for the open or restricted procedures or competitive procedures with negotiation.”
The Stack was the first to report on the BAE contract. According to an FCDO's spokesperson who did not give their name stated that the office does not comment on security but has measures in place to detect and protect against potential cyber events. Further queries about the incident, such as whether classified information was accessed, were declined by the spokesperson.
TechCrunch also contacted the United Kingdom's data protection authority to see if the event had been reported, but is yet to hear back.
The announcement of the apparent incident came only days after the British Council, an institution that specialises in international cultural and educational opportunities, was found to have suffered a severe security breach. Clario researchers discovered 144,000 unencrypted files on an unsecured Microsoft Azure storage server, including the personal and login information of British Council students.
Following an investigation by the UK's National Cyber Security Center, Wilton Park, a Sussex-based executive agency of the FCDO, was hit by a cyberattack in December 2020, which revealed that hackers had access to the agency's systems for six years, though there was no proof that data had been stolen.
