An estimated 20,000 Britons have been approached by Chinese state actors on LinkedIn in the hope of stealing industrial or technological secrets, the head of MI5 has said.
Ken McCallum said industrial espionage was happening at “real scale”, and he estimated that 10,000 UK businesses were at risk, particularly in artificial intelligence, quantum computing or synthetic biology where China was trying to gain a march.
“Week by week, our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity by the likes of China in particular, but also Russia and Iran,” the MI5 director general said ahead of a summit of domestic spy chiefs from the Five Eyes agencies hosted by the FBI in California.
“Activity not aimed just at government or military secrets. Not even just aimed at our critical infrastructure but increasingly [at] promising startups – innovative companies spun out of our universities, academic research itself, and people that understandably may not think national security is about them.”
A key attack vector, McCallum said, was to try and steal information by Chinese actors posing as recruitment consultants on LinkedIn. “We think we’re above 20,000 cases where that initial approach has been made online through sites of that sort,” he said, compared to 10,000 two and a half years ago.
Concerns about Chinese industrial espionage have risen dramatically over the past decade, led by the US whose intelligence and military establishment see their country as being locked in a long-term struggle for dominance of the future economic order.
Christopher Wray, the FBI director, described the Chinese Communist party as “the number one threat to innovation” and accused Beijing of making “economic espionage and stealing others’ work and ideas a central component of its national strategy”.
He said he was running “well north of about 2,000 investigations” relating to Chinese activity, and that his agency was opening a new case file “roughly every 12 hours”.
McCallum did not provide any equivalent figure for MI5, but the agency has previously said its China caseload has risen seven-fold in the past four years.
On Tuesday, the agency 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.
Details were scant but MI5 indicated it was aware of at least two Chinese companies trying to identify legal loopholes to access the sensitive technology of UK firms undetected, and another Chinese company acquiring research data stolen from a top UK university.
Nobody has ever been prosecuted for spying for Beijing in the UK. Earlier this year a Westminster parliamentary researcher was arrested on suspicion of contravening old official secrets legislation, and he is waiting to hear if he will be charged.
McCallum said he expected the new National Security Act, passed into law this year with updated definitions of espionage, would lead to Chinese agents being tried in British courts, similar to how terrorists are prosecuted.
“As we proceed further, you would expect to see our police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts will more often draw relevance to state threats’ work in the way that is entirely routine on our counter-terrorism work,” he said.
The five agency heads were due to meet with representatives of the technology sector later on Tuesday at Stanford University in order to pass on their warnings, after appearing in public together for the first time at a roundtable event in the morning chaired by the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
Five Eyes members include intelligence agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US.
