British Foreign Office Targeted in Cyber Attack

The UK foreign secretary, William Hague, said the British government is increasingly targeted in cyber attacks launched by foreign intelligence agencies.

Speaking at a security conference in Munich on Friday, Mr. Hague revealed that three of its staff members were the target of a spear phishing attack last month.

He explained that the rogue emails were crafted to appear as originating from a colleague within the Foreign Office and carried a malicious attachment.

The foreign secretary noted that while the message looked innocent, "it was from a hostile state intelligence agency and contained computer code embedded in the attached document that would have attacked their machine."

Fortunately, the emails were caught by the security systems before managing to trick anyone. "These are the kind of threats we are now facing every day," Mr. Hague said, according to the BBC.

British media speculated that the attacks originated from China, a country believed to engage in cyber espionage frequently.

In February 2010, a MI5 report entitled "The Threat from Chinese Espionage" leaked to the public. It was marked as restricted and was circulated to top business executives and city officials in order to advise them on how to protect their data.

Back in November, also at a security conference, Simon Kershaw, head of MoD's defence security and assurance, revealed that a high-ranking Ministry of Defence official was also targeted by a foreign intelligence agency in a spear phishing attack.

The email's attachment contained a trojan designed to steal classified documents and forward them to foreign spies.

Mr. Hague also noted during his recent talk that the notorious ZeuS information stealing trojan infected government computers last year.

"Our experts were able to clear up this infection but more sophisticated attacks such as these are becoming more common," the foreign secretary concluded.

In another example, a UK government defence contractor received a malicious email purporting to come from the employee of another defence company.