Britain warns that China is becoming a ‘cyber superpower’

MANCHESTER, England — China is “well on its way to becoming a cyber superpower” a senior British government minister warned on Wednesday, adding that it now simply wasn’t feasible to decouple from Beijing given the country’s role in global supply chains.

Pat McFadden, the most senior minister in Britain’s Cabinet Office, told the CYBERUK conference that Beijing had “the sophistication, the scale and the seriousness” to pose an exceptional national security challenge.

His comments were echoed by the head of the National Cyber Security Centre, Richard Horne, who said during the event that “the continued activity that we’re seeing from the Chinese system remains a cause for profound and profuse concern.”

Their pronouncements follow the United States expressing alarm over Chinese cyber operations. These have included a spying campaign, tracked as Salt Typhoon, that has been compromising entities in the telecommunications sector in the country. Cybersecurity agencies in Europe have warned about similar campaigns affecting their countries, although none have yet publicly attributed these campaigns to the Chinese government.

Denmark said “foreign states hope to gain access to large amounts of data [that] can be used, among other things, to monitor the communication and travel activities of individuals or groups of people, as well as to carry out other forms of espionage,” while the French cybersecurity agency confirmed it had responded to several espionage cyber incidents affecting the telecoms sector.

Canadian intelligence recently warned that China was acquiring “billions of data points on democratic politicians, public figures, and citizens around the world.”

That followed the U.S. announcing dozens of criminal charges against hackers employed by the Chinese government. The charges detailed an entire data brokerage ecosystem in the country, where commercial cyber intrusion groups sell access to target networks and pilfered material to China’s intelligence services.

The NCSC’s Horne said that “the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic approach to capability, legislation and data, means they have a whole, vast, ecosystem entirely at their disposal.”

While the Trump administration in the United States has expressed its intention to tackle the range of challenges posed by China by introducing high tariffs on Chinese imports, McFadden cautioned against economically blockading the country, saying it was “not an option” for the U.K., noting China was “deeply embedded in global supply chains and markets.”

“The job of a responsible Government is to protect our people and constructively engage with the world as it is. ‘Stop the world I want to get off!’ is not in the United Kingdom’s interests,” said McFadden.

“Rather, our approach should be to engage constructively and consistently with China where it is in the U.K.’s economic interests, but also to be clear that we will robustly defend our own cyberspace,” he added.

“We are in a new world. We’ve got to take the long view, not just think about the technologies of today but what it might look like in 10 or 20 years,” said McFadden.

He cautioned that cyberattacks and hacking “are likely to be permanent features of this new global order, there is no point in pretending otherwise” but praised those working in cybersecurity for providing that defense, saying that cyber defenders in the British government were “working tirelessly with our allies, with the Five Eyes alliance, to stay ahead of our competitors.”