Mr. John Wright:

I thank the Chair. From the Department's perspective, we were notified by the National Cyber Security Centre, NCSC, of a potential issue on 16 March while the Minister was away. The NCSC gave no details, but from our perspective nothing had been flagged on any of our systems and we were unaware of any issues. The NCSC's advice was to shut down the Minister's devices and subsequently those of the rest of the party. The NCSC asked that when the party returned those devices be provided to it to be checked. On 21 March we provided the devices to the NCSC as requested and it took them away for forensic analysis. On 11 April the centre came back and confirmed, as it had expected, that the devices were entirely clear and could be put back into service. As a matter of course we completely wiped all the devices and reset them before putting them back into use, but there was no incident.