The British newspaper The Telegraph wrote about the scandal in the UK Ministry of Defence. There are concerns in society that the code from Russian and Belarusian developers could be used to reveal the location of British submarines. In addition, there are suspicions of a leak of secret data, which could be accessed by fraudsters.
The story began several years ago when Rolls-Royce Submarines, which maintains the UK's nuclear submarine fleet on behalf of the Royal Navy, wanted to update its internal software.
The order was transferred to a subcontractor, WM Reply. According to the customer's terms, it was supposed to involve only British citizens to work with classified information. But instead, it partially transferred the work on creating an intranet for submarine engineers to Russia and Belarus.
Programmers from Tomsk and Minsk gained access to classified data about the British submarine fleet. They also had access to the personal data of all Rolls-Royce Submarines employees. At the same time, WM Reply tried to hide the work with foreigners in the defense project.
Senior managers at WM Reply discussed various options for concealing the identity of Belarusian programmers from Rolls-Royce. For example, they instructed one British developer to compile all the software produced in Belarus so that it would appear as if all the code had been created in the UK.
In 2020, some WM Reply employees became concerned about the situation and decided to inform the customers at Rolls-Royce Submarines. The company's management initially forbade them from doing so in order not to lose a valuable contract, but in the spring of 2021, the scandalous information nevertheless leaked to Rolls-Royce Submarines.
An investigation began under the auspices of the country's Ministry of Defence, which ended in February 2023. Contracts with WM Reply were terminated. After the investigation, The Telegraph writes, it turned out that this was not the only project in the British "defense industry" where Belarusian programmers had worked.
As Marion Messmer, a senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank, notes, any people who gain access to the personal data of those working on the UK's submarine fleet are at risk of "blackmail or targeted attack." In other words, foreign programmers may become targets for malicious actors. There is also a risk to submarines.
From a strategic point of view, the advantage of submarines is that they are very difficult to detect and they are very mobile. If someone had access to a tracking system that constantly shows where the submarines are, it would give them a huge strategic advantage — when planning an attack on the UK, they could first target the nuclear submarines and disable "Trident" [the UK's nuclear deterrent deployment and operation system, which includes four strategic submarines with missiles and warheads — ed. note].
Both Rolls-Royce Submarines and WM Reply deny that Russians and Belarusians could have gained access to classified data during their work. They say that the country's national security was not harmed: a full security check of any code was carried out before it was implemented in the network.
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