By Shaun Cooney

Amid the ballistic missiles, robot dogs and autonomous drones of various sizes unveiled at the biggest ever Chinese military parade this month was something that hadn’t been seen before.

Beijing for the first time unveiled its cyberspace unit, charged with the superpower’s cybersecurity and cyberwar measures.

The show of force follows bombshell revelations from GCHQ that Chinese state-sponsored hackers have targeted 80 countries since 2021, including the UK’s critical infrastructure.

The group is also responsible for compromising US telecoms networks, taking up one million call records and targeting 100 Americans, including President Trump, JD Vance and Kamala Harris.

This isn’t the first time entities linked to China have carried out cyber-espionage on UK entities. GCHQ has previously revealed details of similar attacks on the Electoral Commission between 2021 and 2022 - a surveillance operation on MPs and the takeover of 8,500 devices in the UK for espionage purposes.

All signs point to the fact that attacks and operations of this nature will only intensify as hybrid warfare becomes the norm.

Operations come in two main forms: Cyberattacks, where a hacker attempts to damage or destroy a system, and cyber-espionage where the intruder illegally accesses a system to spy on its users or gather confidential information. In both cases the prevalence of these actions is already outstripping our ability to respond.

According to the National Cyber Security Centre, the number of nationally significant cyberattacks targeting the UK has doubled this year. The Defence Secretary admitted earlier this year that the country is under ‘daily attack’.

And there is now a growing awareness of the indiscriminate nature of modern cyberwarfare, both when it comes to espionage - like the scraping of personal and confidential data - and more disruptive actions targeted at critical infrastructure. It cannot be taken as a given that........

© LBC