A password on a slip of paper was lost by a Ministry of Defence (MoD) worker at a petrol station, newly released information shows.
The secret document relating to government business ‘fell from an employee’s pocket’, according to the disclosure.
The MoD originally stated that the missing paperwork had been lost at a location described as ‘public space/unspecified’.
The mishap was among more than 100 ‘potentially disastrous’ incidents of items going astray over a five-month period this year.
After a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the MoD released further details about the loss, which took place on May 16.
The response stated: ‘Having conducted further enquiries, the location of this incident was a petrol station.
‘The document in question was a slip of paper containing a password that fell from an employee’s pocket.
‘Given it was lost, the location was logged as “unspecified”.
‘This incident was reported within a matter of minutes to the appropriate security team and the password changed, rendering the information written on the paper useless.’
The list also included laptops, USB sticks, mobile phones, tablet computers and other paperwork which went missing at official sites, homes and in the post. Of a total of 122 items, 71 remained missing, with the rest located, according to data for the period up to July 2023.
Some were the result of what the MoD said were ‘simple errors’ — such as items said to have been lost in the post.
Professor Anthony Glees, a security and intelligence expert at the University of Buckingham, said: ‘What the Metro has uncovered displays a horrifying and potentially disastrous set of breaches of the MoD’s duty to defend its data in order to deliver our national security.
‘MI5, Britain’s security service, who have the ultimate responsibility of ensuring MoD officials do not put our security at risk, will be hopping mad at what they will regard as a cavalier attitude towards security by MoD staff.
‘What we must assume MI5 understands but some MoD officials fail to get, is that hostile intelligence services, such as those from Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea, seek to build up a rich picture of UK defence activity.
‘That means collecting and analysing anything emanating from the MoD.
‘It is not about access to nuclear codes, in other words the really big national secrets.
‘It’s about the day-to-day business of sustaining the UK’s defence capability.
‘No scrap of information is too irrelevant for those who wish to weaken us.’
The losses were disclosed after a series of FOIA requests submitted by Metro.co.uk over the past two years.
At the time of the first request, the MoD was responding to headlines about a senior civil servant who had misplaced 50 pages of classified MoD documents which were later found at a bus stop in Kent.
Cyber security has sinced emerged as an increased threat to the UK’s critical national infrastructure, with Russia, Iran and China identified as nation states targeting British government systems.
The MoD pointed out that of the losses, 89 ‘were on secure MoD sites or in a private residence’.
One of the disclosures states: ‘Of the losses of documents and removable media (USBs and CDs), the vast majority were of no higher classification than OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE-PERSONAL, and were the result of simple errors or mistakes e.g. items lost in the post.’
Of the documents which were not retrieved, 12, including the slip of paper, were marked ‘secret’, one ‘top secret’ and the remainder official. The item with the highest classification was a hard drive which went missing at an MoD site on May 11, a spreadsheet shows.
Responding to one of the requests, the MoD said: ‘Of the 122 incidents of items reported lost, you will see that 51 of these have subsequently been located. 89 of the losses were on secure MOD sites or in a private residence, which significantly reduces the likelihood of harm resulting from them.
‘Portable electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones can be wiped remotely as soon as the loss is noticed, which also greatly limits the possibility of a security incident occurring.’
The MoD’s policy is to encrypt all laptop, tablets and removable media to minimise the impact of any loss.
A spokesperson said previously: ‘We take the security of defence assets very seriously and have robust procedures to deter and prevent losses and thefts.
‘A very small number of classified items have been listed as security incidents out of an abundance of caution due to accounting discrepancies.
‘All laptops, tablet computers and removable media are encrypted to minimise the impact if a loss were to occur.’
MORE : Top secret hard drive has been missing for six months at Ministry of Defence site
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