Britain's security at risk: Subcontractor's dire misstep exposed

A significant security breach in the United Kingdom involved outsourcing work by one of the subcontractors for Rolls-Royce Submarines to employees in Belarus and Russia. This incident highlights the potential dangers of outsourcing services in certain sectors.

According to The Telegraph, due to errors by the subcontractor, who also attempted to conceal their foreign employees, there was a risk of compromising data on British engineers working on maintaining and developing British submarines carrying nuclear weapons.

With this data, Russian services could, for instance, blackmail these individuals into revealing secret information. All because the company WM Reply, tasked with developing a new intranet (internal network), outsourced part of the work to external programmers from Minsk and Tomsk.

In a 2020 meeting, some employees raised concerns that Rolls-Royce Submarines should be informed. Still, the supervisors ignored these worries and suggested disguising the subcontractors under the identities of deceased Britons. This was to avoid losing a contract worth £500 million.

Eventually, the matter reached Rolls-Royce Submarines in 2021 and the UK's Ministry of Defence in 2022, prompting an investigation until February 2023. It is worth noting that, according to Rolls-Royce Submarines, the subcontractors did not have access to any server data, and every modification to the intranet or other software undergoes a security review before implementation. Nevertheless, WM Reply was blacklisted as a subcontractor for Rolls-Royce Submarines.

As reported by Wirtualna Polska journalist Łukasz Michalik, the British possess a fleet of four Vanguard-class nuclear-powered submarines capable of carrying 16 Trident II nuclear ballistic missiles. Each is equipped with three MIRV (Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle) warheads and has a range of approximately 12,100 kilometres.

The Vanguard-class submarines entered service between 1993 and 1999 as HMS Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant, and Vengeance. They are characterised by a length of 150 metres, a displacement of approximately 17,000 tonnes, and are operated by 132 sailors. Their range and underwater endurance are technically unlimited, with the only constraint being the crew's food supply.

It is worth noting that for seven years, the British faced issues with the HMS Vanguard submarine, which underwent urgent repairs from 2012 to 2022 due to radioactive contamination of the reactor cooling system caused by defective nuclear fuel.