MI5 Director General Ken McCallum has warned that the UK has entered “a new era of national security”, saying threats including arson, sabotage, cyber-attacks, coercion and violence increasingly target “people, businesses, communities” and “the cohesion of our society”.
Delivering his annual threat update to an invited audience at Thames House on Tuesday (13 Oct), McCallum said Russia “remains aggressor number one”, accusing the Kremlin of escalating hybrid warfare while remaining below the NATO Article V threshold. He added that Iran continues using criminal proxies to intimidate opposition figures, media organisations and Israeli-linked sites in the UK, while MI5 remains focused on Chinese state efforts involving espionage, coercion and democratic interference.
McCallum also confirmed that JTAC has raised the UK terrorism threat level to SEVERE, meaning an attack is “highly likely”. He concluded by urging public resilience, saying: “Our adversaries are trying to mess with us, undermine us, divide us. We can choose not to let them.”
In his broader remarks, McCallum outlined three interlinked areas central to the UK’s resilience: protecting critical infrastructure from disruption, strengthening societal cohesion against manipulation, and managing emerging technological risks, particularly those linked to artificial intelligence (AI). He encouraged organisations to improve protective security, urged researchers and technology firms to safeguard sensitive work, and called on the public to think critically about the information they consume.
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