The Daily Populous Tuesday May 14th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by telegraph.co.uk and submitted by TheTelegraph

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is preparing “physical attacks” against the West, the head of GCHQ has warned, as British and American intelligence officials laid bare the dual threat posed by Moscow and Beijing.

Anne Keast-Butler, who was appointed to lead Britain’s signals intelligence operations last May, used her first major speech to highlight the immediate threat posed by the Kremlin and the “epoch-defining” risk posed by China to the UK and its allies.

The GCHQ director told a gathering of cyber security experts in Birmingham that her agency believed Moscow was looking to go further than attacks simply in cyberspace.

The signals agency is “increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyber-attacks – as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations”.

Ms Keast-Butler, who is the first woman to hold the post in the agency’s 105-year history, said Moscow was “nurturing and inspiring” groups of cyber attackers, and “in some cases seemingly co-ordinating physical attacks against the West”.

Last week, a British man was charged with an arson attack in London and accused by prosecutors of working for Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary organisation.

Speaking at the CyberUK conference, Ms Keast-Butler said “Putin has not given up on his maximalist goal of subjugating the population of Ukraine”.

She added that UK support for Kyiv remained “steadfast”, with British spies continuing to bolster the country’s cyber defences.

HokayeZeZ on May 14th, 2024 at 12:16 UTC »

This is definitely why we are seeing European countries increasing rhetoric about troops on the ground in Ukraine in back room roles and closing air space. All the information we are being told there is definitely something big moving behind the scenes of all of this.

AUtiger15 on May 14th, 2024 at 11:31 UTC »

Why is this world filled with so many chodes? Just go fall out of a window already.

neon-god8241 on May 14th, 2024 at 10:59 UTC »

At first I thought plotting physical attacks against the West was an incendiary allegation, and then I remembered that they deployed a deadly never agent inside the UK and realized we knew about this for years