The UK and its allies have only a “narrowing window” to stay ahead of technology threats from Russia and China, the head of the UK’s spy agency GCHQ will warn today.
Director of GCHQ Anne Keast-Butler will say that the UK needs to step up cyber security and make it “10 times more urgent” in the face of “increasingly brazen behaviour” from adversaries.
The world is facing a “new era of radical uncertainty, contested geopolitics and rapidly changing technology,” the director will say in a lecture at Bletchley Park, the war time home of the organisation that became GCHQ.
Russia scaling up threats
“Russia is scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the UK and Europe,” Keast-Butler will tell experts, academics and government officials. “[The country is] relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust.”
Groups linked to Russia were responsible for a series of cyber attacks on Poland’s energy infrastructure last year, which targeted two combined head and power plants and an energy management system for renewable energy.
GCHQ and allies need to fend off cyber attacks, “counter reckless sabotage and assignation attempts”, and attempts by Russia to smuggle Western technology, as the UK continues its support for Ukraine, the director will say.
“Putin is going backward on the battlefield,” she is expected to say.
The spy chief acknowledges that the pace of technological change is the highest it has ever been throughout her 30-year career in national security, and says that the UK and its allies have only a narrow window to stay ahead.
“China is now a science and tech superpower – with sophisticated capabilities across their intelligence, cyber and military agencies,” she will say. The rapid development of AI technology means the “ground beneath our feet is shifting”.
Need to accelerate cyber security
In an inaugural annual lecture, Keast will argue that everyone in the country “from board rooms to living rooms” has a role to play in national security.
“At home, that means taking important action now to switch passwords for passkeys; and for wider society, it means hardwiring security into new technologies, protecting supply chains and making cyber security 10 times more urgent,” she will say.
Nation states – such as China or Russia – were responsible for the majority of “nationally significant” cyber security attacks against the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, disclosed in April.
China’s intelligence and military agencies were capable of an “eye-watering level of sophistication” in offensive cyber operations, its CEO Richard Horne said.
The Chinese hacking group Volt Typhoon has targeted multiple operators of critical national infrastructure (CNI) in Asia and across the US, as it pre-positions for future cyber attacks.
Need for partnerships
GCHQ’s director, marking the 80th anniversary of the UKUSA intelligence sharing agreement, the origin of the special relationship between the UK and the US, will argue that partnerships “are the crux of our resilience and prosperity”.
Referring to letters from Alastair Denniston, the first director of what became GCHQ, Keast-Butler will say that during its more than 100-year history, GCHQ has always prided itself of “foresight, practicality…and partnerships” to protect the UK and its allies. “When humanity is at its worst, we are at our best,” she will say.
