The Government is expected to identify Beijing as responsible for a cyber attack on the Electoral Commission and 43 people including MPs and peers.
The UK is taking measures to protect itself from the “epoch-defining challenge” of an “increasingly assertive” China, the Prime Minister has said.
He said: “We’ve been very clear that the situation now is that China is behaving in an increasingly assertive way abroad, authoritarian at home and it represents an epoch-defining challenge, and also the greatest state-based threat to our economic security.Efforts to step up pressure on China in response to the cyber attack include looking at sanctions on individuals thought to be connected with the alleged activity, according to multiple reports.
Hostile actors were active in our systems and had access to servers which held our email, control systems, and copies of the electoral registers. We have since worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure our systems.The registers held at the time of the cyber attack include the name and address of anyone in the UK who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, as well as the names of those registered as overseas voters.
He insisted the Government took a pragmatic approach to dealing with Beijing amid reports China’s EVE Energy is set to invest in a battery plant in the West Midlands. They include former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, former minister Tim Loughton, crossbench peer Lord Alton and SNP MP Stewart McDonald, the Sunday Times reported.
Sir Iain said “we have been subjected to harassment, impersonation and attempted hacking from China for some time” but MPs would not be “bullied into silence by Beijing”.
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