Can the UK actually stop Chinese cyber interference?

A Chinese cyberattack on British parliamentarians may have been more widespread than the UK government initially revealed.

Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden announced on Monday that British intelligence believed China to be behind "malicious cyber campaigns targeting democratic institutions and parliamentarians" between 2021 and 2022.

Beijing allegedly accessed the personal details of some 40 million voters held by the Electoral Commission, the UK's election watchdog. A second campaign, thought by British intelligence to have been carried out by Chinese state-affiliated hacking group APT31, targeted China-sceptic parliamentarians. 

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The UK government initially announced that the targets were three MPs and one peer, but the i news site reported that "more than 30 MPs, peers, and their parliamentary staff were targeted by the same cyber hack, which was in the form of a phishing email". 

The MPs were members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac), a group of parliamentarians with "hawkish" views on China, said the site, adding that it was "unclear at this stage" why the full extent of the hack had not been revealed.

What did the commentators say?

British lawmakers from parties across the political spectrum have "lashed out" at Dowden for the "weak" sanctions imposed on China in the wake of the revelations, with only two of the group's alleged members affected, said Politico.

China hawk and Conservative heavyweight Iain Duncan Smith said the UK's response was like an "elephant giving birth to a mouse". Another MP affected by the hack, the SNP's Stewart McDonald, said Dowden had "turned up at a gunfight with a wooden spoon".

The US and New Zealand also condemned China for its cyber espionage activities. Washington implemented sanctions against two alleged APT31 members, as well as five others. But these actions "are unlikely to have much impact on China's efforts", said The Economist. The letters in the group's name stand for "advanced persistent threat", which is not only "technical jargon for an attack that involves lurking undetected in a target's network" but also "happen to convey the West's gloomy view of China's cyber onslaught". 

The UK has sought to downplay the impact of Chinese hacking it detected. But the US said that not only had work and personal accounts been compromised, so too had information that "could be released in support of malign influence targeting democratic processes and institutions". In January, FBI chief Christopher Wray warned of China's extensive cyber capabilities, and said that China's state-sponsored hackers outnumber the FBI's cyber personnel by "at least 50 to one".

"At what point, do you think, will our diplomats and bean-counters realise they have been honey-trapped?" asked Juliet Samuel in The Times. 

For years, British officials have "sold us the story of China as the great opportunity for Britain", first as the "miraculous source of ultra-cheap technology", and then "as a fount of essentially free money to fund mega-investments". But "only now are we starting to count the cost of these illusions": compromised national security in pursuit of economic opportunity. 

China "may be an inescapable fact of the global economy, but this makes self-defensive measures more, not less, necessary," she said. 

What next?

Linking the attacks to China, a fellow member of the UN Security Council, is certainly "an escalation in the diplomatic tension" between the UK and China, and marks a significant change from just a few years ago under David Cameron's administration, which aimed to "usher in a Golden Age' with China," said the BBC.

The UK government's concern over Chinese espionage and parliamentary interference had been "rising" in recent years after a parliamentary researcher was arrested under the Official Secrets Act in 2023, accused of spying for China. And the year before an "unusual" parliamentary interference alert was issued regarding the activities of UK-based lawyer Christine Lee.

Speaking to the BBC's "Westminster Hour", former minister Tim Loughton, one of the MPs affected by the hack, said that "for too long" the government has not taken the "strategic threat" from China seriously enough.

"We need to have a raft of senior Chinese officials seriously sanctioned because of what's been going on with this cyberattack, what's going on in Hong Kong [and] in Xinjiang", he told the programme.

Beijing has rejected the allegations that it or state-affiliated organisations were responsible for the attacks. "China has always firmly fought all forms of cyberattacks according to law," a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Britain told The Guardian. "China does not encourage, support or condone cyberattacks."