Cyber attacks have the potential to disrupt almost everything on which our society and economy depend, from transport to water and energy systems, including the National Grid, to the functioning of all major companies and parts of the state.
The data hosted on these systems is valuable and may prove to have immense value, especially as advances in artificial intelligence render data a fundamental resource shaping the potential of new algorithms to surpass human capabilities in some areas.
Cyber attacks come in many different forms, but can allow the attacker both to disrupt the systems on which we all depend and to extract data that may be valuable or sensitive.
As well as data acquisition, cyber attacks can be used to sabotage critical systems, leading to loss of functionality and/or physical damage.
In spite of the evident importance of the cyber domain and the pre-eminent place of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a cyber superpower associated with attacks affecting the UK, when UK-China Transparency commenced work on this area in 2024 we found that there existed no single list of all the PRC-linked cyber attacks affecting the UK.
The rolling list of such attacks we have now published and update regularly is the backbone of our work in this area. The PRC-linked attacks to date have focused on data collection instead of system disruption, except in as much as great disruption is caused when an organisation has to address any attack.
Nonetheless, any penetrative attack is hostile and naturally carries a threat of deliberate sabotage.
Hostility by the PRC against the UK in the cyberdomain is one of the driving forces behind major new government and private-sector activity.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) was set up in 2016 and has more than 1000 employees and a multi-billion pound budget. The cyber security sector in the UK employees roughly 150,000 people and is worth in excess of £15 billion.
The NCSC’s annual review of 2025 stated that “state actors continue to present a significant threat to UK and global cyber security”, listing four states, China first amongst them.
The PRC’s hostility towards the UK in the cyber domain does not, in spite of this, feature in all debates about whether the PRC poses a threat to the UK. Indeed, the topic is often ignored.
In February 2025, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), “an impartial research and knowledge exchange service based in the UK Parliament”, published a summary of the UK-China relationship. An 800-word section on “Challenges and Opportunities” featured no mention of PRC cyber hostility.
Our work in this area extends to the UK’s broader telecommunications and data infrastructure.
We were the first British organisation to expose the scandal relating to the purchase of Global Switch, a British data centre company that, after its purchase by Chinese entities over the course of 2016-2019, likely continued to carry sensitive government data through its sites in London.
We are determined to continue investigating the UK-China dynamic in the worlds of cyber and data, and raise awareness of PRC hostility and the potentially devastating consequences of our vulnerability to it.
UK-China Transparency’s work on cyber and data extends beyond charting attacks emanating from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that have affected the UK. We also seek to analyse bilateral relations as they pertain to the cyber domain, the role of the PRC in the digital systems which create the landscape for cyber attacks, the supply chains behind them and how these impact the UK, data flows between the UK and China, and bilateral activity in the private sector and in universities that relates to the cyber domain.
