London ‘needs to wake up to prolific cyber attack threat from Chinese state’

LONDON needs to “wake up” to the scale and severity of the threat of spying, intellectual property theft and interference operations by China, a leading MP warned today.

Former Cabinet minister Theresa Villiers, who sits on Parliament’s intelligence and security committee, said China was targeting the capital “prolifically” as it sought to gain economic, political or military advantages.

Parliament, government departments, leading universities, the City and company HQs make London a target-rich ecosystem for state cyber attacks. Speaking to the Evening Standard, Ms Villiers, Conservative MP for Chipping Barnet, said: “London needs to wake up to the scale of the risk posed by China, to our prosperity, our science and technology and our cyber security. We are targeted prolifically by China.

“We do need to be more resilient than we are at the moment... that’s across the board in London. I fear that most of us don’t appreciate the scale of the risk.” In the Square Mile, law firms, accountants, auditors and other professional services may be picked out given the high-level of regulation, including on resilience, for banks whose computers may be harder to hack. Chinese statebased actors are understood to have shown a particular interest in stealing secrets on mergers and acquisitions, which could give state-owned enterprises in China a competitive advantage. Supply chains, IT and other technology firms may also be targeted as an easier back door into a major businesses.

Once a system is breached, state-based actors could remain hidden inside it for months, or even years, showing strategic patience to play a “long game”.

The Electoral Commission was hacked in August 2021 but it was only alerted to the breach in October 2022. The Government said Beijing-linked hackers were behind the attack which exposed the personal data of 40 million voters, as well as targeting 43 individuals including MPs and peers. A front company and two individuals linked to the APT31 hacking group were sanctioned in response. Cabinet minister Gillian Keegan said China was a “security risk” but that the Government does not want to “start trade issues,” amid accusations from some Tory MPs that it was being too weak.

Former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a member of the inter-parliamentary alliance on China, told LBC radio: “If you go on appeasing countries like this, you end up with a worse problem at the end of it.”

Cyber security at Westminster has been significantly tightened over the years as MPs were being targeted.

Professor Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, said universities were not “designed and equipped to protect national security” so the Government would have to “take the lead on that”.

China is believed to seek out not only research and technological breakthroughs, particularly from centres of excellence in maths and sciences, but also the development of ideas, in higher education institutions, think tanks and other non-governmental organisations, which could feed through into Government policies.

LONDON is poised to reach further out into the sky. Plans are afoot to build scores of new tall buildings across the capital over the next few years in a wave of construction that will reshape the city’s skyline for the next century.

A remarkable 230 high-rise projects of 20 storeys or more have been granted detailed consent since 2017, a rate of more than three per month. Only this week, developer Brookfield Properties revealed it was planning a 54-storey skyscraper at 99 Bishopsgate that, when completed, would be the fifth tallest building in the Square Mile.

Planning is never straightforward and opposition is often curiously well-organised. But as the capital continues to grow, the race for space will only intensify — with Londoners crying out for more room in which to live, work and have fun.

And so if the health of a city can be summed up by the erection of cranes and the images of steel, concrete and glass, then London should be content. When it comes to the future, the only way is up.