For years, the primary concern of Britain’s security services has been facing down the threat from jihadism, an obligation that is unlikely to change for some time. But the British government is now asking the services to find space for another growing challenge – the threat posed to UK businesses and institutions from cyber espionage.
The UK, like the US, is wary of naming China and Russia directly as the main sources of such espionage, much of which involves the theft of intellectual property from companies in areas such as defence, energy and aerospace. But the scale of the threat from these states and from other sources is troubling.
BAE Systems Detica, which specialises in cyber security, has calculated that UK companies lose ￡27bn a year through cyber espionage. Sir Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, said last year that one UK company had lost ￡800m of intellectual property in one cyber attack. Though last week’s attack by hackers on European anti-spam sites fell into the category of obstruction rather than espionage, it may also leave businesses out of pocket by slowing or even blocking access to certain websites.