Tuesday briefing: Why the US and UK are going public with warnings about Chinese hacking

Taken together, the announcements represent an attempt to raise the alarm globally about the sheer scale of Chinese hacking – but Beijing is unlikely to be cowed. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Jamie MacColl, a research fellow in cybersecurity at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), about whether these are isolated incidents, or the tip of a digital iceberg...Both the US and UK have blamed a Chinese state-backed group they call Advanced Persistent Threat 31 (APT 31). New Zealand blamed a separate group, APT 40. While the UK’s decision to point the finger at China has grabbed headlines, the truth about attacks like the ones described by Oliver Dowden yesterday is that they are “pretty routine”, said Jamie MacColl.