- Such attacks are designed to provide China with—primarily—IP, in order to give it a shortcut on research and development time and costs, thereby giving it an advantage over competitors.[1] It also allows China to identify technologies and IP that could be acquired through legitimate investment.
- Of potentially greater concern than the power stations themselves are the supply chains. The supply chains for Hinkley Point C and Bradwell B will each involve large numbers of UK companies ***. We questioned witnesses who told us that *** in the supply chains in the Civil Nuclear sector ***. NCSC described ***.[2]The Joint State Threats Assessment Centre (JSTAT) and NCSC assess that ***.[3]
- NCSC explained that, in conjunction with MI5 ***:
*** previously we looked very much at our National Infrastructure in counter-terrorism terms—things you can put bollards around—and that didn't help very well with the logical assets and digital infrastructure that webbed across our infrastructure—you know, how telco [telecommunications] is linked to Energy…
*** allows us to understand how these things touch—and what that is bringing out, of course ***
NCSC said that, as a result:
we have stood up new capability in this area, *** and will allow Government to target our resource in the areas that reach across sectors in a way that we have not been able to do before.[4]
LLL. We are reassured that the Intelligence Community have recognised the *** vulnerability that potentially lies in the supply chains: effort to protect against cyber attacks must include the supply chains.
- China appears routinely to use its proposed foreign investments for political leverage ***. China's very significant investment in the UK's Civil Nuclear sector would therefore seem to provide it with very significant leverage. However, the Intelligence Community *** assess that China is unlikely explicitly to use those investments to exert leverage over the UK, as doing so may compromise China's wider economic and commercial objectives: [5] the DNSA confirmed that the Intelligence Community have ***. [6]
- Nevertheless, they acknowledge that "[the application of leverage] is still possible and over the lifetime of the projects Chinese tactics may change".[7] We should not therefore be
