Payout offered to Afghans hit by UK data breaches


Afghan nationals whose personal information was mistakenly exposed by the Ministry of Defence in 2021 will be offered up to £4,000 each in compensation, the government has said.

The data breaches affected 277 people, some of whom had worked for the UK government and were in hiding from insurgent Taliban forces at the time. Defence Minister Luke Pollard said he could not “undo past mistakes” but promised that the payments would be made “as quickly as reasonably practical”. The government expects the total cost to be around £1.6m and comes on top of the £350,000 it had to pay after receiving a fine from the data watchdog.

Read more…
Source: BBC News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.


Related:

  • Twitter hacker ordered to pay back £4.1m worth of Bitcoin

    November 17, 2025

    A Twitter hacker who breached the accounts of celebrities including Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos has been forced to hand over £4million. Joseph James O’Connor, 26, was jailed in the US for the hacks which involved scamming people out of Bitcoin and threatening celebrities with the release of personal images and messages. Now the CPS Proceeds ...

  • Five major changes to the regulation of cybersecurity in the UK under the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill

    November 16, 2025

    As the UK Government has recognized, cyber incidents—such as Jaguar Land Rover, Marks and Spencer, Royal Mail and the British Library—are costing UK businesses billions annually and causing severe disruption. The Government recognizes that cybersecurity is a critical enabler of economic growth (“we cannot have growth without stability”), and that the current laws have “fallen out ...

  • Europol: End of the game for cybercrime infrastructure: 1025 servers taken down

    November 13, 2025

    Between 10 and 13 November 2025, the latest phase of Operation Endgame was coordinated from Europol’s headquarters in The Hague. The actions targeted one of the biggest infostealers Rhadamanthys, the Remote Access Trojan VenomRAT, and the botnet Elysium, all of which played a key role in international cybercrime. Authorities took down these three large cybercrime enablers. ...

  • UK: NHS providers reviewing stolen data published by cyber criminals

    November 11, 2025

    Pathology supplier Synnovis is contacting NHS organisations which had data stolen and published online following a major cyber attack last year. Synnovis has now completed its investigation into patient and staff data published online by the cyber criminal gang on 20 June 2024, which includes personal data such as names, NHS numbers, test results and test ...

  • UK: BBC leaders resign amid scandal over misleading edit of Trump speech

    November 10, 2025

    Two top leaders at the BBC resigned on Sunday amid an escalating scandal over impartiality and bias that plunged Britain’s public broadcaster into one of its biggest crises in recent years. The BBC’s most senior executive, director general Tim Davie, and the chief executive of the news division, Deborah Turness, both quit after the leak of ...

  • UK: Hundreds of residents’ details shared in data breach

    November 4, 2025

    A council chief has apologised after hundreds of residents’ sensitive data was mistakenly shared online. Some names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of 625 people who responded to South Gloucestershire Council’s consultation on 24 October were published online for three days. Once the error was spotted, council officers took “very prompt action” to remove the ...