“The UK has revealed that Chinese state-backed actors were responsible for gaining access to computer networks around the world via Microsoft Exchange servers,” the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) announced in a press statement yesterday. The aim of this alleged “most significant and widespread cyber intrusion against the UK and allies uncovered to date,” the NCSC asserted, was “to enable large-scale espionage” by the Chinese state.
The hacking of Microsoft’s business servers was detected last March. Then yesterday, the great outcry became that China has been “proven” to be behind the hacking. How timely. President Biden has been seeking a meeting with President Xi Jinping, and last week, a State Department spokesman named Afghanistan as one of the few areas where the U.S. and China can cooperate.
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Secretary of State Tony Blinken issued parallel statements, Blinken’s pontificating that China ‘s “pattern of irresponsible, disruptive, and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace, which poses a major threat to our economic and national security,” Raab’s promising the Chinese government “can expect to be held to account if it does not.”
And what is the NCSC? An agency of Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters intelligence and cyber agency, known as GCHQ, notorious (amongst other things) for its leading role in the “Russiagate” operation against President Donald Trump which sank his efforts to establish a working relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
