Vladimir Putin’s Russia is preparing “physical attacks” against the West, the head of GCHQ has warned.
Anne Keast-Butler, who was appointed to lead Britain’s intelligence operations last May, has used her first major speech to highlight the growing threat posed by the Kremlin.
She said GCHQ was “increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyber attacks – as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations”.
Given heightened tensions between Russia and the West, Ms Keast-Butler said Moscow was “nurturing and inspiring” groups of cyber attackers, and “in some cases seemingly co-ordinating physical attacks against the West”.
Russia has long been accused of protecting cyber gangs that target Western organisations, allowing them to operate with relative impunity as they carry out sophisticated hacks.
Last week, the National Crime Agency named Dmitry Khoroshev, a Russian national, as the person behind LockBit – a ransomware group that has stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from businesses.
Royal Mail fell victim to a LockBit attack last year, as the Russia-based gang paralysed the postal service’s ability to send letters and parcels abroad.
Prior to that, LockBit also targeted London-listed car dealership Pendragon, scrambling computers across its 200 sites and demanding a £60m ransom to unlock them.
Speaking at the CyberUK conference in Birmingham, Ms Keast-Butler told an audience of cyber security and defence experts that “Putin has not given up on his maximalist goal of subjugating the population of Ukraine”.
However, she added that UK support for Kyiv remained “steadfast”, with British spies continuing to bolster the country’s cyber defences.
The GCHQ director, who is the first woman to hold the post in the agency’s 105-year history, also flagged China as a “genuine and increasing cyber risk to the UK”.
While she said the UK was open to engaging with China on areas that are “mutually beneficial”, such as climate change or artificial intelligence safety, Ms Keast-Butler added that the “PRC poses a significant risk to international norms and values”.
She said China was looking to shape global technology standards “in its own favour” and looking to “assert its dominance within the next 10 to 15 years”, stressing that the country poses an “epoch-defining challenge” to Britain and its allies.
The warning over China comes days after it emerged a Ministry of Defence contractor was hacked in an attack blamed on Beijing.
Payroll data on 270,000 current and former military personnel was compromised in the breach.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
