Quote:A new wave of cyber attacks against British companies is a "critical national security threat", an analyst has told Sky News.

It follows the exposure of a previously unknown vulnerability in software used by hundreds of companies.

But unlike the recent attacks against M&S, Co-op and Harrods, the latest incident was not ransomware but rather remote code execution.

This is where hackers take control of devices and networks over the internet to run potentially malicious programmes or steal data and information.

The event - revealed by analyst Arda Buyukkaya at cybersecurity firm EclecticIQ - used a previously unknown backdoor in a piece of software called SAP Netweaver, with a patch since released.

Cody Barrow is the chief executive of EclecticIQ and previously worked at the Pentagon, the NSA and US Cyber Command.

He told Sky News: "Governments should treat this as a critical national security threat", adding that it is the kind of scenario that keeps people like him up at night.

Mr Barrow said the exploitation of networks is "extensive and ongoing", with more than 500 SAP customers affected and more potentially at risk. He urged users to update their software to the latest version.

Gas giant Cadent, publishers News UK, Euro Garages (EG) Group, Johnson Matthey and Ardagh Metal have been named as victims, with US and Saudi Arabian entities also targeted.

NHS England has posted a warning about the exploit on their website, although it is not clear if they are impacted.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the UK government's authority on cyber threats and part of GCHQ, are monitoring the situation.

Quote:China remains the top military and cyber threat to the U.S., according to a report by U.S. intelligence agencies published on Tuesday that said Beijing was making "steady but uneven" progress on capabilities it could use to capture Taiwan.

China has the ability to hit the United States with conventional weapons; compromise U.S. infrastructure through cyber attacks; and target its assets in space, the Annual Threat Assessment by the intelligence community said, adding that Beijing also seeks to displace the United States as the top AI power by 2030.

Russia, along with Iran, North Korea and China, seeks to challenge the U.S. through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, with Moscow's war in Ukraineaffording a "wealth of lessons regarding combat against Western weapons and intelligence in a large-scale war," the report said.

Released ahead of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee by President Donald Trump's intelligence chiefs, the report said China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) most likely planned to use large language models to create fake news, imitate personas, and enable attack networks.

"China's military is fielding advanced capabilities, including hypersonic weapons, stealth aircraft, advanced submarines, stronger space and cyber warfare assets and a larger arsenal of nuclear weapons," Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the committee. She labeled Beijing as Washington's "most capable strategic competitor."

"China almost certainly has a multifaceted, national-level strategy designed to displace the United States as the world's most influential AI power by 2030," the report said.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the committee that China had made only "intermittent" efforts to curtail the flow of precursor chemicals fueling the U.S. fentanyl crisis because it was reluctant to crack down on lucrative Chinese businesses.

Trump has increased tariffs on all Chinese imports by 20% to punish Beijing for what Trump called its failure to halt shipments of fentanyl chemicals. China has denied playing a role in the crisis, the leading cause of U.S. drug overdose deaths. The issue has become a major point of friction between the Trump administration and Chinese officials.

"There is nothing to prevent China ... from cracking down on fentanyl precursors," Ratcliffe said.

The Chinese foreign ministry said it "advised the U.S. not to use its own hegemonic logic to mirror China, and not to use outdated Cold War thinking to view China-U.S. relations," when asked about the report on Wednesday.

The ministry urged Washington to stop "condoning and supporting Taiwan independence separatist activities," ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.

The spokesperson for China's embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said the United States has long "hyped up" the China threat as an excuse to maintain U.S. military hegemony.

"China is determined to be a force for peace, stability and progress in the world, and also determined to defend our national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity," Liu said, adding that "fentanyl abuse is a problem that the United States itself must confront and resolve."

Quote:Chinese public security authorities attributed a cyberattack on an unnamed technology company to the Taiwan government on Tuesday, prompting the latter to blame China for spreading disinformation over such breaches.

The "overseas hacker organisation" behind the attack was "supported by" Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), authorities in the capital of southern Guangdong province said in a statement, based on an initial police investigation.

The DPP is the ruling party in Taiwan.

Taiwan's National Security Bureau in turn accused the Communist Party of China (CPC), which it called "a source of global information security threat", of peddling false information about cyber breaches.

It said in a statement to Reuters that the CPC was "manipulating inaccurate information to confuse the outside world, so as to cover up the related cyber hacking acts" and shift the focus of attention.

China claims Taiwan as its territory even as the democratic and separately governed island rejects that claim.

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te, who last week marked one year in office, has said only Taiwan's people can decide their future.

Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported that a police investigation found the hacker organisation targeted network systems in more than 10 provinces in China in recent years, including military, energy, hydropower, transportation and government networks.

Xinhua, citing technical experts, said the attacks were of "low technical level", their method "simple and crude."

Taiwan's security authority said: "The CPC has long carried out cyber hacking and theft of funds from Taiwan, disseminated false information, and carried out cognitive warfare in an attempt to destroy Taiwan's critical infrastructure and create social division and antagonism."

Quote:The Czech government on Wednesday condemned China for carrying out a cyberattack against its foreign ministry exposing thousands of unclassified emails.

Czechia said that the Chinese state-sponsored group Advanced Persistent Threat 31 (APT31) targeted the foreign ministry from 2022 — the year the country held the rotating EU presidency — and was able to read unclassified emails sent between embassies and EU institutions.

The Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, said he would summon the Chinese ambassador immediately to explain the findings and tell him this would damage the countries' bilateral relations.

"With today’s move, we have exposed China, which has long been working to undermine our resilience and democracy,” Lipavský said. “Through cyberattacks, information manipulation, and propaganda, it interferes in our society — and we must defend ourselves against that.”

It is the first time the Czech government has attributed a national cyberattack to a state-backed actor.

An investigation conducted by the Security Information Service, Military Intelligence, Office for Foreign Relations and Information, and National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NUKIB) provided Czech authorities with a high degree of certainty about who was behind the targeting of the ministry.

APT31 is run by China’s ministry of state security from the city of Wuhan, according to the U.S. justice department.

The group has been accused of high-profile attacks in the past, including targeting the personal emails of campaign staff working for U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020. In 2024, the U.K. and U.S. imposed sanctions on individuals tied to APT31.

The alleged Chinese hack sparked outrage in Brussels, among the EU's top brass and at NATO headquarters.

Quote:China is increasingly spying on Dutch semiconductors and other high-tech areas, Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said on Saturday.

Key takeaways:

China is increasing its spying activity on Dutch semiconductors
Dutch intelligence agency says that "the biggest cyber threat is coming from China"
"The semiconductor industry, which we are technologically leading, or technology advanced, of course, to get that intellectual property - that's interesting to China," Brekelmans told Reuters on Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore.

In April last year, the Dutch intelligence services released an annual report noting China’s increased activity in spying on the Dutch semiconductor, aerospace, and maritime industries.

Commenting on the threat, Brekelmans said: "It's continuing. In our newest intelligence reports, our intelligence agency said that the biggest cyber threat is coming from China, and that we do see most cyber activity when it comes to us being as from China. That was the case last year, but that's still the case. So we only see this intensifying."

He added that the Netherlands is focusing more on security as China is "using their economic position for geopolitical purposes and also to pressure us.”

Despite significant catch-up in its race for semiconductors, China is still lagging behind global leaders overall.

“Ten years ago, [Chinese semiconductor companies] were two generations behind. Five years ago, they were two generations behind, and now they’re still two generations behind,” G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of research firm TechInsights, said.

And yet, China is making impressive progress. In 2021–2022, 55% of global semiconductor patent applications were Chinese, more than double that of American patents.

Despite semiconductor design firms in China increasing nearly sixfold between 2010-2022, Chinese design firms still accounted for only 8% of global design revenue in 2022, with no Chinese firms among the top 25 global design firms.

Quote:Cybersecurity investigators noticed a highly unusual software crash — it was affecting a small number of smartphones belonging to people who worked in government, politics, tech and journalism.

The crashes, which began late last year and carried into 2025, were the tipoff to a sophisticated cyberattack that may have allowed hackers to infiltrate a phone without a single click from the user.

The attackers left no clues about their identities, but investigators at the cybersecurity firm iVerify noticed that the victims all had something in common: They worked in fields of interest to China’s government and had been targeted by Chinese hackers in the past.

Foreign hackers have increasingly identified smartphones, other mobile devices and the apps they use as a weak link in U.S. cyberdefenses. Groups linked to China’s military and intelligence service have targeted the smartphones of prominent Americans and burrowed deep into telecommunication networks, according to national security and tech experts.

It shows how vulnerable mobile devices and apps are and the risk that security failures could expose sensitive information or leave American interests open to cyberattack, those experts say.

“The world is in a mobile security crisis right now,” said Rocky Cole, a former cybersecurity expert at the National Security Agency and Google and now chief operations officer at iVerify. “No one is watching the phones.”

US zeroes in on China as a threat, and Beijing levels its own accusations

U.S. authorities warned in December of a sprawling Chinese hacking campaign designed to gain access to the texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans.

“They were able to listen in on phone calls in real time and able to read text messages,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois. He is a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the senior Democrat on the Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, created to study the geopolitical threat from China.

Chinese hackers also sought access to phones used by Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance during the 2024 campaign.

The Chinese government has denied allegations of cyberespionage, and accused the U.S. of mounting its own cyberoperations. It says America cites national security as an excuse to issue sanctions against Chinese organizations and keep Chinese technology companies from the global market.

“The U.S. has long been using all kinds of despicable methods to steal other countries’ secrets,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said at a recent press conference in response to questions about a CIA push to recruit Chinese informants.

U.S. intelligence officials have said China poses a significant, persistent threat to U.S. economic and political interests, and it has harnessed the tools of digital conflict: online propaganda and disinformation, artificial intelligence and cyber surveillance and espionage designed to deliver a significant advantage in any military conflict.

Mobile networks are a top concern. The U.S. and many of its closest allies have banned Chinese telecom companies from their networks. Other countries, including Germany, are phasing out Chinese involvement because of security concerns. But Chinese tech firms remain a big part of the systems in many nations, giving state-controlled companies a global footprint they could exploit for cyberattacks, experts say.

Quote:The reconnaissance activity targeting American cybersecurity company SentinelOne was part of a broader set of partially-related intrusions into several targets between July 2024 and March 2025.

"The victimology includes a South Asian government entity, a European media organization, and more than 70 organizations across a wide range of sectors," SentinelOne security researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Tom Hegel said in a report published today.

Some of the targeted sectors include manufacturing, government, finance, telecommunications, and research. Also present among the victims was an IT services and logistics company that was managing hardware logistics for SentinelOne employees at the time of the breach in early 2025.

The malicious activity has been attributed with high confidence to China-nexus threat actors, with some of the attacks tied to a threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze, which, in turn, overlaps with Chinese cyber espionage groups publicly reported as APT15 and UNC5174.

In late April 2024, SentinelOne first disclosed PurpleHaze-related reconnaissance activity targeting some of its servers that were deliberately accessible over the internet by "virtue of their functionality."

"The threat actor's activities were limited to mapping and evaluating the availability of select internet-facing servers, likely in preparation for potential future actions," the researchers said.

It's currently not known if the attackers' intent was to just target the IT logistics organization or if they planned to expand their focus to downstream organizations as well. Further investigation into the attacks has uncovered six different activity clusters (named to A to F) that date back to June 2024 with the compromise of an unnamed South Asian government entity.

Quote:Corporate investigators have reportedly discovered evidence that Chinese hackers infiltrated an American telecommunications company in the summer of 2023, suggesting that China’s attackers penetrated the U.S. communications system far earlier than publicly known.

Bloomberg reports that corporate investigators working for an unnamed U.S. telecommunications firm have uncovered that Chinese state-backed hackers had breached the company’s systems in the summer of 2023, nearly a year before the publicly disclosed Salt Typhoon espionage campaign targeting multiple US telecom providers. The discovery, which has not been previously reported, raises questions about the timeline of China’s foothold in the American communications industry.

According to two people familiar with the matter and an unclassified report seen by Bloomberg News, the investigators found that malware used by Chinese state-backed hacking groups had been present on the company’s systems for seven months, starting in the summer of 2023. The report, sent to Western intelligence agencies, does not name the compromised telecommunications company.

The 2023 intrusion predates the well-publicized Salt Typhoon campaign, which the US government has attributed to Chinese state-backed hackers. In the Salt Typhoon breaches, hackers infiltrated multiple major US telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon Communications, siphoning personal data of millions of Americans and targeting the phones of high-profile individuals such as then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, his running mate JD Vance, and then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

The malware used in the 2023 breach, known as Demodex, is a rootkit that provides hackers with deep and secretive access to infected machines. Several cybersecurity companies have linked Demodex to Chinese hacking groups targeting telecommunications companies and governments in Southeast Asia. The malware has also been tied to the Salt Typhoon attackers and other hacking groups.

In the 2023 breach, hackers gained access to the computers of IT administrators at the targeted U.S. telecommunications company. The investigation revealed that the malware remained on the firm’s systems until late winter of 2024. Demodex is designed to leave few digital traces, making it challenging to determine the full extent of the hackers’ activities once inside the breached machines.

The Chinese government embassy in Washington emphasized the difficulty of determining the origins of hacks and accused the US and its allies of being responsible for cyberattacks on China. The embassy spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, called on the relevant party to “stop using cybersecurity to smear and slander China, and stop spreading all kinds of disinformation about the so-called Chinese hacking threats.”

Quote:A cyberattack on The Washington Post compromised the email accounts of several journalists and was most likely the work of a foreign government, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Matt Murray, The Washington Post’s executive editor, said in an internal memo that the breach was discovered on Thursday and an investigation had been initiated, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Staff at The Washington Post were told the intrusions compromised journalists’ Microsoft accounts and could have granted the intruder access to work emails, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

The reporters whose emails were targeted included members of the national security and economic policy teams, including some who write about China, the report added.

The Washington Post did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. In 2022, News Corp, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, was breached by digital intruders.

The email accounts and data of an unspecified number of journalists were compromised in that incident.

Quote:The Marks & Spencer hackers sent an abuse-filled email directly to the retailer's boss gloating about what they had done and demanding payment, BBC News has learnt.

The message to M&S CEO Stuart Machin - which was in broken English - was sent on the 23 April from the hacker group DragonForce using an employee email account.

The email confirms for the first time that M&S has been hacked by the ransomware group – something that M&S has so far refused to acknowledge.

"We have marched the ways from China all the way to the UK and have mercilessly raped your company and encrypted all the servers," the hackers wrote.

"The dragon wants to speak to you so please head over to [our darknet website]."

The cyber attack has been hugely damaging for M&S, costing it an estimated £300m. More than six weeks on, it is still unable to take online orders

The extortion email was shown to the BBC by a cyber-security expert.

The message, which includes a racist term, was sent to the M&S CEO and seven other executives.

As well as bragging about installing ransomware across the M&S IT system to render it useless, the hackers say they have stolen the private data of millions of customers.

Nearly three weeks later customers were informed by the company that their data may have been stolen.

The email was sent apparently using the account of an employee from the Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - which has provided IT services to M&S for over a decade.

The Indian IT worker based in London has an M&S email address but is a paid TCS employee.

It appears as though he himself was hacked in the attack.

TCS has previously said it is investigating whether it was the gateway for the cyber-attack.

The company has told the BBC that the email was not sent from its system and that it has nothing to do with the breach at M&S.

M&S has declined to comment entirely.

'We can both help each other'
A darknet link shared in the extortion email connects to a portal for DragonForce victims to begin negotiating the ransom fee. This is further indication that the email is authentic.

Sharing the link – the hackers wrote: "let's get the party started. Message us, we will make this fast and easy for us."

The criminals also appear to have details about the company's cyber-insurance policy too saying "we know we can both help each other handsomely : ))".

The M&S CEO has refused to say if the company has paid a ransom to the hackers.

DragonForce ended the email with an image of a dragon breathing fire.