Chinese state actors have approached 20,000 Britons on LinkedIn with the eventual goal of stealing industrial or technological secrets, the MI5 director general, Ken McCallum, has said.
The aim was to try to fool people by posing as recruiters, and the scale of activity appeared to be accelerating, with 10,000 people targeted in the past two and a half years compared with a similar number in the five years before that.
Industrial espionage was happening at “real scale” McCallum said, and he called for business in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology or other sensitive areas to be alert and understand what he described as an economic threat to the whole UK.
“Week by week, our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity by the likes of China in particular, but also Russia and Iran,” McCallum said, at the start of a summit of the spy chiefs from the Five Eyes intelligence agencies hosted by the FBI in California.
“Activity is not aimed just at government or military secrets. Not even just aimed at our critical infrastructure but increasingly promising startups – innovative companies spun out of our universities, academic research itself, and people that understandably may not think national security is about them.”
He added there were potentially tens of thousands of businesses of interest to China, part of “very, very widespread gathering of information at quite a low threshold”. Taken together, this could add up to “real damage” to British and wider western interests if Beijing were to dominate emerging technologies.
MI5 said it was aware of 20 instances of Chinese companies considering or pursuing use of “obfuscated investment, imaginative company structures” to circumvent regulations in order to gain access to technology developed by British companies and in universities.
McCallum said he expected the new National Security Act, passed into law earlier this year with its updated definitions of espionage, would allow for Chinese agents to be prosecuted in the British courts, similar to the way that terrorists are prosecuted.
The five agency chiefs will meet representatives of the technology sector later on Tuesday at Stanford University in order to pass on their warnings, after appearing at a roundtable event in the morning chaired by the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
Last month, Downing street said China had tried to headhunt British nationals from the government. The targeting of civil servants – both past and present – was particularly marked, No 10 said, forcing MI5 and other agencies to be “acutely aware and vigilant” in safeguarding official information.
