We have learned that Beijing had been hacking mobile devices belonging to the closest advisors of three successive British Prime Ministers over four years.
Chinese operatives compromised several senior members of the government working at 10 Downing Street during the Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak governments from 2021 to 2024 in one of the worst British intelligence failures in decades.
Chinese state-sponsored hackers weaponized the United Kingdom’s wiretap infrastructure to expose the private communications of their own officials, according to a Jan. 26 exclusive report published in The Telegraph. The breach at Downing Street is part of a larger global espionage operation by Beijing targeting members of the Five Eyes intelligence network, which includes the United States, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
This comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Labour greenlighted a controversial expansion of the Chinese embassy over protests from MI5, which is concerned about critical espionage risks. MI5 issued an espionage alert to Parliament in November about the threat of spying from Beijing.
The Telegraph also reported that the Chinese are building a secret chamber next to Britain’s most sensitive communication cables, as part of a network of 208 secret rooms beneath its new London mega-embassy. The strategic cables form the core of the London Internet Exchange (Linx), which is connected to Atlantic cables leading to the U.S.
Linx is one of the biggest internet exchange points in the world and handles vast volumes of data spanning everything from financial transactions to instant messages and emails that banks worldwide use to update withdrawals and deposits, including paychecks and payments for goods bought online.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in the United States and the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, that require telecommunications carriers to build backdoors into their networks for court-ordered wiretapping. However, Chinese hackers working for Beijing found those backdoors and used them to compromise their targets’ phone data as part of an operation called Salt Typhoon. This gave Beijing the ability to geolocate millions of individuals, read text messages, and record phone calls at will.
It is unknown whether China compromised the mobile phones of the prime ministers themselves, but The Telegraph reported that one source with knowledge of the security breach said that the hack went “right into the heart of Downing Street.”
By hacking the surveillance of their own surveillers, Beijing’s Ministry of State Security’s Chengdu bureau was able to see who British officials were calling, as well as jeopardizing American counterintelligence operations by compromising FBI investigations of Chinese espionage and their knowledge of Chinese Communist activities in the U.S.
American intelligence sources told The Telegraph that Starmer and his senior staff may also be compromised just before his trip to China this week to secure trade and investment ties with Beijing. Officials have been warning since 2025 that Chinese hackers had gained access to telecommunications companies around the world.
The FBI and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, the public-facing arm of GCHQ, issued an alert last year, revealing that Chinese state-sponsored “cyber threat actors” were a threat to global telecommunications, government systems, and military infrastructure in the U.S., Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
The alert said that stolen data “ultimately can provide Chinese intelligence services with the capability to identify and track their targets’ communications and movements around the world” and added that hackers often “maintain persistent, long-term access” to networks, suggesting that security risks are still ongoing.
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee warned in December 2025 that the “Government has no strategy on China, let alone an effective one” and was “singularly failing to deploy a ‘whole-of-state’ approach” in responding to the Chinese threat. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy told The Telegraph, “China is a staunch defender of cyber security and one of the major victims of cyber espionage and attacks.”
“We have been resolute in combating all kinds of malign cyber activities in accordance with the law, and never encourage, support or condone cyberattacks. We firmly oppose the practice of politicizing cybersecurity issues or accusing other countries without evidence.”
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