NATO has announced it is investigating the alleged hack of a European firm that makes missile defence systems.

According to the group, it is assessing that impact of the breach, which saw classified military documents, including designs for weapons, leaked online.

MBDA, formed from a merger of France’s Matra, the UK’s BAE Dynamics and Italy’s Alenia, is a major European developer and manufacturer of missiles.

“We are assessing claims relating to data allegedly stolen from MBDA. We have no indication that any Nato network has been compromised,” a NATO spokesperson said about the missile firm hack.

The attack first came to light at the end of last month when, on the 30th of July, hackers claiming to be part of the Adrastea group claimed to have stolen 60GB of data from MBDA. The data was going for 15 bitcoins (£273,000), and the hackers claim to have had one buyer so far.

According to the group, they exploited a critical vulnerability in the company’s security. In a post on Russian-language forum XSS, they insinuated that they accessed MBDA through an external drive from the company’s Italian branch.

“The downloaded data contains confidential and closed information about the employees of your company,” the group said in an announcement posted to hacker forums.

Among its claims were that the information was connected to a series of MBDA’s closed military projects and commercial activities in the interests of the Ministry of Defence of the European Union.

This includes design documentation for air defence missile systems and coastal protection systems. The group shared 50MB of samples of the data they claimed came from MBDA. Among the trove were documents labelled “NATO CONFIDENTIAL” and “NATO RESTRICTED”.

These are the two lowest of the four NATO security levels, meaning that their disclosure would be damaging to NATO interests.

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In a statement, MBDA claimed that it had not been hacked. It said that the hackers were spreading rumours in an attempt to blackmail the organisation.

“The origin of the data has already been ascertained, having been acquired from an external hard drive. It has been confirmed that no hacking of the company’s secure networks has occurred. So far, the company’s internal verification processes indicate that the data made available online are neither classified data nor sensitive,” the company said in a statement.

It also added that none of the classified files belong to it. As such, the investigation is currently centred around one of the company’s suppliers.

MBDA said that it is currently cooperating with Italian authorities as part of an investigation into the breach.

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