China massively stealing Western commercial secrets: MI5

China is engaged in a massive exercise to steal commercial secrets, including innovations from Western countries on a scale “unprecedented in human history”, the security chiefs of the Five Eyes alliance said.

Ken McCallum of MI5, the United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, said more than 20,000 people in the UK have been approached covertly online by Chinese spies.

McCallum spoke to the BBC at an unprecedented public appearance in California of the security chiefs of the Five Eyes alliance -- the UK, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The rare joint public appearance was meant to warn about commercial secrets being covertly obtained by China.

Stanford University in California was chosen as the venue as it lies in the heart of Silicon Valley. Besides issuing a public statement, the chiefs met entrepreneurs and investors.

"We have seen a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale," McCallum said.

Sustained thievery

BBC said the fear now was that innovation was often stolen from small companies, start-ups and researchers who may not previously have worried about security.

The report said MI5 was trying to warn tens of thousands of UK companies who are potentially at risk, and doing so required the security service to go public in a way it has not done before.

McCallum said MI5 suspected Chinese agents had approached over 20,000 people in the UK over professional networking sites like LinkedIn in order to try to cultivate them to provide sensitive information.

MI5 has also seen more than 20 instances of Chinese companies considering or actively trying to gain access to sensitive technology developed by UK companies and universities through investments or other means.

In all instances, the full role of China was hidden, often through complicated company structures, McCallum said. MI5 and its allies also disrupted the acquisition of a sensitive UK tech company itself linked to UK military supply chains and the supply chains of other major western commercial companies.

Long-term danger

China has consistently denied accusations of espionage and wrong-doing, BBC reported.

The consequences of research being stolen in cutting-edge fields like Artificial Intelligence are not just for a company's profitability but also for the future of western countries, the head of MI5 warned.

"And we know that authoritarian states are laser-focused on the opportunities that these technologies may present for them."

FBI director Chris Wray said: "China has made economic espionage and stealing others' work and ideas a central component of its national strategy and that espionage is at the expense of innovators in all five of our countries.

"That threat has only gotten more dangerous and more insidious in recent years," he added.

"All nations spy," said Mike Burgess of Australia's security service. “But the behaviour we are talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage."

He said the scale was unprecedented in human history and needed to be called out.