- Labour pains - 28th October 2025
- Hack attack - 28th October 2025
- Playing politics - 27th October 2025
Disturbing revelations that China accessed “vast amounts” of sensitive information, including intelligence briefings, and accusations that Russia is also behind internet hacking designed to subvert key continental European elections, highlight once more how The Eye too have been targeted by hackers.
The latest astonishing security breach was covered up by the UK Government, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
The classified information was viewed by China in 2020 after Beijing compromised a system used to store secret data, the former adviser to Boris Johnson told The Times.
Mr Cummings said: “It was so bizarre that, not just Boris, a few people in the (briefing) room were looking around like this: ‘Am I somehow misunderstanding what he’s saying? Because it sounds fucking crazy’.”
He added that the information included “vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control”.
This news comes after a dire warning about China’s actions from the boss of MI5 as well.
Sir Ken McCallum said the UK needed to “defend itself robustly” against security threats from China, as he revealed the agency had “intervened operationally” against Chinese related activity several times in just one week.
But other states are also involved in attacking the UK.
Sir Ken declared that Russia had carried out operations which were “routinely” being uncovered.
The background to all this is alarming as the UK’s National Cyber Security Agency has warned that firms using Cisco systems could also be at risk from hackers.
Worldwide nearly 50,000 Cisco firewall devices have vulnerabilities which are connected to the internet, according to statistics from the Shadowserver Foundation illustrating the extent of the world’s exposure to the flaws in its Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense devices.
These have earned a rare emergency patching directive from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Shocking details have emerged as well about hacks suffered by leading car makers, and they have followed Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Co-Op being struck earlier this year.
As well as disrupting its online business, the hack affected M&S in-store too, leaving shelves bare in the days after it was targeted, and the huge company admitted that some personal customer data was taken during the attack.
Most of the firm’s systems had to be switched off, and without the technology that links stores and warehouses, food went to waste.
The website, through which one-third of M&S fashion, home and beauty is sold, was down for around six weeks.
The stock price dropped by almost 14 per cent in that period, while competitors like Next rallied.
Once most of the business was back up and running, M&S estimated it had lost a total of £300 million in operating profit as a result of the attack, roughly one-third of what it made last year.
A ‘foreign entity’ as Mr Cummings has proclaimed, might also include Russia, because there have been worrying accusations that this country, too, is behind illegal internet hacking to secure their aims.
Criminal gangs may be involved in the M&S and Co-Op hacks, but the backdrop is extremely concerning, as it has also emerged that Czechia had been flooded by pro-Russian disinformation before a crucial election, where the country tilted even further towards the European Union (EU).
There was a huge volume of fake news – and it has increased steadily since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine to a record high of some 5,000 articles per month, according to Vojtěch Boháč, an investigative journalist with Czech outlet Voxpot.
A recent Voxpot investigation found that the 16 largest disinformation websites churn out more content than all Czech traditional media outlets combined.
Articles ranged from critical takedowns of the EU and NATO to extraordinary conspiracy theories, including claims that Brussels is promoting cannibalism as a solution to climate change.
In Moldova too there is enormous concern.
Leading up to a central Parliamentary vote there the Prime Minister Dorin Recean declared that Moscow was spending “hundreds of millions” of Euros as part of a “hybrid war” to try to seize power, which he described as “the final battle for our country’s future”.
The Moldovan President Maia Sandu alerted people to the “massive Russian interference”, saying the future of her country, which is flanked by Ukraine and Romania, was at stake.
The war in Ukraine made Moldova very important to Russia. According to Moldova’s Government, the Kremlin spent $200 million (the equivalent of one per cent of Moldova’s annual GDP) on disinformation and bribing voters.
On election day, bomb scares were reported at polling stations for expatriates in Italy, Romania, Spain and America.
One of Russia’s banks is said to have been opening accounts and transferring money to Moldovans in pro-Russian parts of the country.
Although tiny in comparison, we too have attracted the unwanted attention of those connected to Russian authorities.
Our site always used to get a couple of ‘allow requests’ from e-mail addresses with the .ru (Russia) ending, but recently this has increased massively, and at one point there were four or five A DAY!
There has also been a marked increase in online ‘disinformation’ campaigns, which appears to be linked to the cyber attacks.
In the past Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries.
Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.
Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames ‘Portal Kombat’.
Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. But over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022.
French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.
Viginum says it closely watched the sites over several months, and managers there have concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread “deceptive or false” content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media.
The underlying objective it would seem, is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe, and according to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organisation.
If sensitive UK Government information is also being stolen by ANOTHER foreign power, it is obvious that hacking into computer systems is extremely dangerous and widespread now.
Ministers need to watch out, and so do we!
Tomorrow – how in his long journalistic career our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, almost becomes used to the abuse he suffers when he exposes huge official mistakes or bewildering bureaucracy, and this is now highlighted by a glaring error in a Welsh Government (WG) statement…
The memories of Phil during that career (when foreign interference was rare) as he was gripped by the incurable disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
