New investigation reveals violation of security rules by British contractor that turned to outsourcing.

The United Kingdom’s submarine fleet could be prone to hacker attacks as the codes for the intranet used by its engineers was written by Russian and Belarussian developers, in violation to Ministry of Defence rules for British contractors.

An investigation by The Telegraph says the software was supposed to be designed by British employees with access to classified information but the contracted firm, WM Reply, had partially outsourced the coding work to a company in Minsk, which in turn hired specialists in Russia.

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The British contractor attempted to conceal this fact despite clear evidence of breaching the regulations and confidentiality clauses imposed by the Ministry of Defence; the latter has begun an investigation and found a national security threat.

Additionally, WM Reply's top managers, in order to hide the involvement of third parties, instructed a British developer to compile the software designed by the Belarusian programmers so that it would appear as though the entire code had been written in the UK. The company allegedly attempted to conceal the developers' locations and even considered using the names of deceased UK citizens.

Not only are the submarines at risk, but also a previous project, for which the same firm worked with the same Belarussian developers, The Telegraph notes.

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WM Reply, which in turn was a subcontractor of Rolls-Royce Submarines, dismissed the claims that their actions could have compromised Britain’s national security, assuring that they regularly reviewed their work processes and respected clients' security requirements.

The name of the Belarussian company was not revealed.

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