Cummings said China breached high-level systems used to transfer so-called Strap material, a government classification for highly sensitive intelligence data.<\/p>\n
In the interview, he said the compromised information included: “Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. <\/p>\n
“Things the government has to keep secret. If they’re not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it.”<\/p>\n
He told the newspaper: “The cabinet secretary said, ‘We have to explain something; there’s been a serious problem’, and he talked through what this was.<\/p>\n
“And it was so bizarre that, not just Boris, a few people in the room were looking around like this – ‘Am I somehow misunderstanding what he’s saying?'”<\/p>\n
He added: “What I’m saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised.”<\/p>\n
Cummings also claimed the breach was covered up.<\/p>\n
“If the MPs want to finally have an inquiry about it, I’d be happy to talk about it,” he said.<\/p>\n
A former government security official told the BBC he was “mystified” by Cummings’ claims.<\/p>\n
Professor Ciaran Martin became the first chief executive of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and stood down in August 2020.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Radio 4’s The World Tonight programme, Prof Martin cast doubt on Cummings’ claim that the so-called Strap system was breached.<\/p>\n
“This is, to the best of my knowledge, categorically untrue,” he said. “That would have fallen to the National Cyber Security Centre to lead and there was no such investigation.”<\/p>\n
Prof Martin added: “China is a consistent and serious cyber security threat\u2026 but these systems are entirely different. <\/p>\n
“They’re built, monitored, secured and operated in an entirely different way than normal internet-based systems. <\/p>\n
“It doesn’t follow that\u2026 they [China] can somehow penetrate these entirely bespoke systems and there wasn’t any evidence in 2020 that they did so.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cummings said China breached high-level systems used to transfer so-called Strap material, a government classification for highly sensitive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-203593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}