Public Accounts Committee tears into department responsible for the most dangerous breach in British history

The UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has failed to appropriately improve its data protection mechanisms, three years after the infamous 2022 Afghan data breach.

In a damning report published this morning, the PAC concluded that it was aware of how risky its data-handling procedures related to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) were at the time.

The committee still does not have confidence that the department could prevent a similar breach in the future.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the PAC, said that in continuing to run "inadequate systems to handle sensitive personal information," the MoD "knew what it was doing," despite the significantly worsened security environment in Afghanistan at the time of the breach.

Central to the report, and the disaster in general, was the MoD's "inappropriate" casework system.

At the time, it was relying on Excel spreadsheets stored ...