Britain’s nuclear submarine software built by Belarusian engineers

Mr Cartlidge, a former minister for defence procurement, said that when he was in the MoD, officials were looking at supply chains, in particular the issue of ensuring the UK did not become “over-reliant on certain suppliers for items that are significant for our critical infrastructure”. Ed Arnold, at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, said in this case there was a “principal security threat” of state-sponsored sabotage but also the potential for information to fall into the hands of criminals. “The issue with data these days is you can store it pretty quickly and easily. Once you lose control of the data, you can’t get it back,” he said. “It would give a state actor a pretty good intelligence start point. If you want to compromise systems, you need to first work out who to target. If you can get a dataset which does the pre-sifting for you, it means that subsequent approaches and targeted pitches are more productive.”