It has emerged that the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was the target of a “serious cyber-security incident” – the details came via a tender document published on a government website, seemingly by mistake.

Criminals rarely tackle government or military groups without serious backing, an educated guess would point to an ATP supported by a nation state. Even if sensitive data wasn’t compromised, the turmoil of a breach and the embarrassment caused is often enough to warrant this sort of incident as a win for the attacker.

With the current geopolitical climate heating up (Ukraine, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc) we’d expect to see more attacks on governments and institutions. It speaks volumes to the current state of national cyber security that contractors were brought in to help deal with this, not to mention the fact that details of the incident have accidentally been leaked.