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 immensely valuable, especially as advances in artificial intelligence render data a fundamental resource shaping the potential of new algorithms to surpass human capabilities in some areas.
But cyber attacks come in many different forms and can allow the attacker not just to extract data that may be valuable or sensitive but also to disrupt the systems on which we all depend. Cyber attacks should not, therefore, be understood merely as a form of espionage.
Cyber attacks can be used to sabotage critical systems, leading to loss of functionality and/or physical damage. The 2025 hack of Jaguar Land Rover’s factories in the UK illustrated this. The attack led to weeks of non-production and at least 0.1% GDP loss for the UK.
Most cyber attacks, even if they do not involve direct sabotage, impose a cost on their victims, as vulnerabilities must be patched and access purged.
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.
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.
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.
For example, 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. Remarkably, an 800-word section on “Challenges and Opportunities” featured no mention of PRC cyber hostility.
Not only that, but British universities continue to train Chinese students from institutions close to China’s military and security apparatus in cyber-related domains. In July 2026, UKCT published a new paper on British universities that have cyber-related partnerships with Chinese universities connected to China’s defence and intelligence ecosystem. The paper, entitled ‘One Network, Two Systems’, exposed how British universities run joint courses with specific departments at specific Chinese universities that are deeply linked to parts of the Chinese state associated with cyber attacks. The full paper can be read here.
