Britain faces the ‘most complex and interconnected threat environment’ ever seen, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said in a ‘national security threat update’.
On terrorism, he said that ‘since March 2017, MI5 and the police have together disrupted 43 late-stage attack plots’, some ‘in the final days of planning mass murder’. As for what motivates those who would be terrorists, he described the split of MI5’s counter terrorist work as ‘roughly 75 per cent Islamist extremist, 25pc extreme right-wing.. He added that terrorism that the security service sees has a ‘dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies’, due to online reading and radicalising from ‘online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation’.
About one in eight, 13pc of all those being investigated by MI5 for involvement in UK terrorism are under 18, he added. He stressed how central the online world is to the setting of threats, whether by mere ‘armchair extremists’ or real plotters; ‘lone individuals, indoctrinated online, continue to make up most of the threats’.
As for state threats, he spoke of ‘Russian state actors turning to proxies for their dirty work, including private intelligence operatives and criminals’, from the UK and other countries, generally connecting online. He urged businesses and public authorities to think about the risks, cyber and real-world, and to seek out guidance from the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA), part of MI5. He also discussed Iran, which also makes ‘extensive use of criminals as proxies’; and China. There he spoke of risks, and choices to be managed, ‘and it rightly falls to ministers to make the big strategic judgements on our relationship’.
Summing up, he stressed the ‘finite capacity’ of MI5 whether to apply itself to strategy or operations. He paid tribute to ‘critical contribution from human intelligence’ to thwart plots, and saluted partners.
He pointed out that the UK terrorist threat level remains at substantial, meaning that an attack is deemed likely. For the full speech, visit the MI5 website. For the terrorism threat levels visit https://www.mi5.gov.uk/threats-and-advice/terrorism-threat-levels.
Comment
In one of his regular bulletins, the business continuity trainer and consultant Charlie Maclean-Bristol of BC Training pointed to four risks; the nation-state cyber threat (involvement of nation-states could make cyber attacks more impactful, with the added risk that you may not have the opportunity to pay a ransom to regain access to data), propagation of unrest, attacks on people and sabotage. He summed up that ‘organisations should review their risks, as well as those of their suppliers, to account for nation-state threats and proxy attacks, and then take appropriate mitigation actions’.
