Industrial espionage: China has targeted 20,000 Britons on LinkedIn, says MI5

State actors posing as recruiters with goal of stealing secrets, says security service director general

Chinese state actors have approached 20,000 Britons on LinkedIn with the eventual goal of stealing industrial or technological secrets, the MI5 director general, Ken McCallum, has said.

The aim was to try to fool people by posing as recruiters, and the scale of activity appeared to be accelerating, with 10,000 people targeted in the past two and a half years compared with a similar number in the five years before that.