Passwords belonging to British politicians, diplomats and senior police officers have been traded by Russian hackers, it has been reported.
Russian hackers stole lists of private details of, among others, Education Secretary Justine Greening and Business Secretary Greg Clark, according to the Times.
Many British officials said to have used weak and old passwords.
"There's hacks going on all the time... we're incredibly vulnerable", Newman said, the Times reports.
The lists contain the information of 1,000 MPs and their staff as well as 7,000 police employees and 1,000 Foreign Office officials.
The appearance of the lists on Russian-speaking hacking forums suggests that hackers from that country may have been behind the theft of the login data.
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Fears have been raised that government officials using insecure passwords could leave government accounts and computers open to further attacks, especially when similar passwords are used across different accounts.
The majority of the passwords are said to have been compromised in a 2012 hacking raid on the business social network LinkedIn, in which millions of users' details were stolen.
Rashmi Knowles, EMEA field CTO at RSA, commented: "This story shows just how important it is that people change all their passwords in the wake of a breach".
Whilst the data seems to be out of date by now, there is concern that the information could potentially be used to blackmail or impersonate officials via their personal accounts.
The National Crime and Security Centre (NCSC) confirmed that its cyber security advice would be reissued to government departments in light of the discovery by The Times.
Even though the data is old, meaning passwords have likely been changed and accounts closed, it hold clues in the data that could allow hackers to profile targets and launch phishing attacks created to snaffle more up-to-date login credentials.
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