New Delhi: MI5 Director General Ken McCallum delivered the annual threat update at Thames House in London Thursday, outlining the key security challenges faced by United Kingdom in 2025. The threat update, an annual event for the British intelligence agency, is used to brief security experts, officials and journalists on terrorism, espionage and modern threats, like large-scale cyber attacks.
While remembering the 20th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, McCallum warned of the ever-increasing number of threats faced by the UK. He also highlighted the growing threats as a result of online radicalisation of youth through “Islamist and extreme Right-wing ideologies”. He warned of a “new era” marked by “overlapping threat” from both terrorists and state actors, and how MI5 is adapting to protect the UK from increasingly technology-driven threats.
Read the full speech here:
“Thank you for joining me today at Thames House for my annual threat update.
Just two weeks ago, at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, we saw horrific violence against a community at prayer on the holiest day in the Jewish faith. I offer my very deepest sympathies to those bereaved, injured and affected by this sickening act of terror.
It was the kind of appalling act, which MI5, our police partners and many others work so hard to prevent.
This summer we marked the 20th anniversary of another appalling act. I will never forget the morning of the 7th of July, 2005. I was in a meeting with the then Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller when the news came in of the horrific attacks which devastated London. The next few weeks—the next couple of years—were a blur, as a generation of MI5 officers gave their all, in operations rooms and in foreign fields, to take on Al Qaeda threats to the UK.
In July, MI5, with the nation, fell silent as we remembered those killed and injured twenty years ago. And we took stock of the threats our nation faced then; of the threats we face now; of how we’re countering them.
I’d like to take stock with you today. Because we are in a new era.
MI5’s fight against terrorism remains intense: my teams are running near-record volumes of investigations. But we are also having to contend with a second menace of equal or even greater scale, in fast-rising state threats.
In 2025, a more hostile world is forcing the biggest shifts in MI5’s mission since 9/11.
So, today, I’ll speak about the profound change in covert threats facing the UK, and what MI5, with its partners, is doing to keep our country safe.
Terrorism remains an ever-present threat: it demands our unrelenting focus.
Since the start of 2020, MI5 and the police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots. And we’ve intervened in many hundreds of developing threats.
On average our investigations tend to be narrower in scope than once was the norm: my teams are mostly focused on individuals and small groups, rather than larger, more established networks.
But the aggregate scale of the terrorist threat remains huge. And the range of what’s coming at us – from terrorists holding poisonous Islamist, Extreme Right Wing or other ideologies – just keeps growing.
As I spoke about last year, groups overseas are continuing their attempts to direct terrorism into the UK and Europe.
Al Qaeda and Islamic State are once again becoming more ambitious, taking advantage of instability overseas to gain firmer footholds. They are both personally encouraging and indirectly inciting would-be attackers in the West.
Terrorism breeds in squalid corners of the internet where poisonous ideologies, of whatever sort, meet volatile, often chaotic individual lives.
The online environment can blur motive, too. Some situations are clear-cut. But it’s often messier. In 2025, it can be hard to tell in the immediate aftermath of an appalling violent crime whether the incident is terrorist or state-directed, and thus a national security matter, or non-ideological, driven by a unique personal grievance, fixation or mental disturbance.
We are particularly conscious of these complexities when it comes to vulnerable young people.
Sadly, we continue to see a concerning number of minors in our national security investigations: one in five of the 232 terrorism arrests last year were of children under 17.
This needs fresh thinking…which is why I’m pleased to announce that the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre is now home to the Interventions Centre of Expertise.
This is a new and growing multi-agency team of professionals, drawn from both the national security community and wider public services.
The Centre’s ambition is to bring a range of professional expertise in managing threats in cases involving adolescents, mental ill health and other complex risks. If a vulnerable young person on a pathway towards extremist violence can receive the right support, such that expensive and scarce MI5 capabilities are not needed and fewer children feature in national security prosecutions, that’s good for everyone involved.
This phenomenon cannot be for MI5 and Counter Terrorism Policing to tackle alone. We want the Centre we’ve launched to be the start of something bigger.
Finally on terrorism, Northern Ireland. Communities there are now living through the longest period without a national security attack since the start of the Troubles. We will continue, with the police, to bear down on residual threats and degrade terrorist capabilities.
Turning now to state threats.
I spoke twelve months ago about rising aggression on UK soil.
Data on MI5’s operations extends that worsening trend. State threats are escalating.
In the last year, we’ve seen a 35 percent increase in the number of individuals we’re investigating for involvement in state threat activity. That means espionage, including against our Parliament, our universities, our critical infrastructure.
But now, states are also consistently descending into ugly methods MI5 is more used to seeing in our terrorism casework.
My teams are routinely uncovering attempts by state actors to commission surveillance, sabotage, arson or physical violence, right here in the UK.
We are dealing with these threats every day. We wish we weren’t. But we’re rising to the challenge.
I’ll begin with Russia.
Putin’s grim attempt to subjugate Ukraine is well into its fourth year.
But the sweeping triumph once imagined in the corridors of the Kremlin is no closer.
Part of Putin’s failure is due to the defiant spirit of the Ukrainian people. On my office wall hangs a plaque from counterparts in Kyiv, which says, “Victorious allies win because they fight not against enemies, but for their values and freedoms.”
Those of us contending with Russian sabotage and intimidation tactics further West are actively learning from Ukrainian resilience in the face of sustained aggression—both overt and covert.
Anyone watching the news can see that Russia is committed to causing havoc and destruction. Our partners across Europe are dealing with it every day, from cyber-attacks to sabotage. We stand with them.
Because the UK is no different.
In the last year, we and the police have disrupted a steady stream of surveillance plots with hostile intent aimed at individuals Russian leaders perceive as their enemies.
And we’re seeing Russia-based figures continuing to use online platforms in wider attempts—largely unsuccessful—to sow the seeds of violence, chaos and division here in the UK.
You will understand I can’t itemise our most recent disruptions. But you already know that six individuals were convicted in May for carrying out a range of malign activities in the UK and across Europe.
The orders were Russian. But the foot soldiers weren’t highly trained Russian operatives. Or even poorly trained Russian operatives. They happened to be Bulgarian nationals, motivated by money and the thrill of playing spies. They were, in the jargon, proxies.
You can see why Russia is resorting to this tactic. Many hundreds of Russian spies were expelled from their embassies across Europe.
So the Russian intelligence services are picking up what they can online—recruiting proxies on social media platforms, instructing them via encrypted apps, and offering payment in cryptocurrencies.
Our six convicts will have plenty of time to reflect on their side of the bargain while they serve their combined fifty years.
As, I expect, will the five men convicted in July of setting fire to an East London warehouse containing supplies for Ukraine.
If you are a proxy, you’re disposable. You may well be ‘ghosted’ on payday. When you’re caught, you’ll be abandoned. You will not feature in a prisoner exchange. You’re on your own.
With our partners across Europe, MI5 will keep detecting those who take orders from Russian thugs. And we will keep following the trails back to those giving the orders, who imagine they’re anonymous and unfindable behind their screens. They’re not.
Now, to Iran.
Iran’s autocratic regime is likewise frantically trying to silence its opponents around the world, including in the UK.
2025 has required MI5 to grow our counter-Iran effort once again. MI5 has tracked more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in just the one year since I last stood at this podium.
The UK was among the first to call out this wave of Iranian transnational aggression. But we are far from alone.
A few weeks ago, my Australian counterpart exposed the Iranian hand behind a series of antisemitic attacks there, including against a café and a synagogue. Dutch colleagues revealed a failed assassination attempt in the Netherlands, and an earlier one in Spain.
In a collective public response to this shared threat, 14 nations, including the UK, together condemned Iran’s efforts to kill, kidnap and harass in Europe and North America.
We will continue to call out this activity, and we will confront it together.
Behind the scenes, MI5 and our police partners continue to catch those who are reckless enough to become Iranian pawns.
China.
The UK-China relationship is by its nature complex, but MI5’s role is not: we detect and deal, robustly, with activity threatening UK national security.
Whether that comes in the form of cyber espionage, as in the wide-ranging SALT TYPHOON intrusions called out a few months ago.
Or clandestine technology transfer, as we tackle a steady stream of attempts to lure UK academic experts.
Or efforts to interfere covertly in UK public life, as in the case of Christine Lee and other well-publicised episodes where we have taken disruptive steps.
Or harassment and intimidation of opponents, as we saw when the Hong Kong Police issued bounties against more than a dozen pro-democracy activists here in the UK.
When it comes to China, the UK needs to defend resolutely against threats and seize the opportunities that demonstrably serve our nation.
Our Five Eyes allies share the same pragmatic approach.
The policy choices lie in exactly which lines you draw, which balances you strike. Those choices are for government, informed by expert security advice.
Whatever the policy choices, just on security grounds there are good reasons for maintaining a substantive relationship with China. When lines are crossed, being seriously engaged gives the UK a stronger platform from which to push back.
MI5 will keep doing what the public would expect of us: preventing, detecting and disrupting activity of national security concern. Our track record is strong. We’ve intervened operationally again just in the last week. And we will keep doing so.
I am MI5 born and bred. I will never back off from confronting threats to the UK, wherever they come from.
The National Security Act passed by Parliament in 2023 strengthened our hand against state-backed threats, whether from China, Russia, Iran or others. Longstanding weaknesses in the UK’s legislation have been closed.
But in this new era, with multiple overlapping threats on an unprecedented scale, we need to up our game. We can’t rely solely on investigating and disrupting. Together we have to ensure the UK is a hard target.
We want our adversaries to think twice before acting against us. And if they’re foolish enough to try, we want them to have limited impact.
We don’t need everyone to become a national security expert. But whether you’re operating critical infrastructure or investing in cutting-edge tech, there are simple and effective actions you can take to protect yourself, your organisation, and the UK.
This is where MI5’s National Protective Security Authority, or NPSA, comes in.
With decades of experience, NPSA can advise you on protecting your supply chain, your valuable IP, your physical assets, whether the threat is from sabotage, theft or drones.
And its sister organisation, the National Cyber Security Centre, NCSC, has produced a Cyber Action Toolkit to help businesses protect themselves.
NPSA can also advise on more personal threats. If you serve in public office and are in danger of being targeted by a state actor, or if you need to figure out whether a tempting online job advert in your sector is just too good to be true, NPSA has published advice this week that will help you protect yourself.
NPSA and NCSC will work hand-in-glove to provide expert advice as threats continue to evolve. Check out the NPSA and NCSC websites. Before the morning after.
There is one last risk I can’t ignore.
You’ll have noticed throughout my remarks that technology is an enabler of every modern threat. Which brings me to AI.
Would-be terrorists already try to harness AI for their propaganda, their weapons research, their target reconnaissance. State actors exploit AI to manipulate elections and sharpen their cyber attacks.
AI is far from all downside, of course. It presents precious opportunities for MI5, with GCHQ, MI6 and others, to enhance our ability to defend the UK.
My teams already use AI, ethically and responsibly, across our investigations—conducting automated trawls of images we’ve collected to instantly spot the one with a gun in it; searching across large volumes of messages between suspects to clock a buried phrase that reveals an assassination plot. AI tools are making us more effective and more efficient in our core work.
MI5 has spent more than a century doing ingenious things to out-innovate our human— sometimes inhuman—adversaries. But in 2025, while contending with today’s threats, we also need to scope out the next frontier: potential future risks from non-human, autonomous AI systems which may evade human oversight and control.
Given the risk of hype and scare-mongering, I will choose my words carefully. I am not forecasting Hollywood movie scenarios. I am, on the whole, a tech optimist, who sees AI bringing real benefits. But, as AI capabilities continue to power ahead, you would expect organisations like MI5, and GCHQ, and the UK’s ground-breaking AI Security Institute, to be thinking deeply, today, about what ‘Defending the Realm’ might need to look like in the years ahead.
Artificial intelligence may never ‘mean’ us harm. But it would be reckless to ignore the potential for it to cause harm.
We’re on the case.
Before I conclude, allow me to say a few words on the difficulties MI5 has experienced over the last year in the courts.
I want to affirm, on record, the importance MI5 attaches to accountability and oversight. It is a process to which MI5 commits itself, even when, especially when, we have fallen short of the high standards we rightly have to hit.
Going a step further, I recognise that particular responsibilities fall on a secret agency. The fact that our best work has to be done away from the public eye effectively places an additional duty on an organisation like MI5, to ensure the very highest standards in any and all submissions we make into court processes.
Being examined under a bright spotlight is something we never see happening to our intelligence service adversaries in authoritarian states. And those nations are the poorer for it.
Part of why MI5 exists is to defend our national way of life—a way of life which includes the checks and balances of rigorous independent oversight.
To have their organisation justly criticised by the courts is an experience no serious leader ever wants. But I am glad to serve, and to live, in a nation where such scrutiny takes place. And with my teams I am determined to implement the needed improvements, while being held to account for the progress we make.
In 2025, MI5 is contending with more volume and more variety of threat, from terrorists and state actors, than I’ve ever seen.
Total security is, as we know, impossible in the kind of free society in which we all want to live.
But still, we continue to strive for it, night and day.
MI5, alongside the police, MI6, GCHQ, the NCA, the military and many others, is part of one of the most capable and connected national security systems in the world. We do succeed in detecting threats people are trying hard to conceal. We do get ahead of them in time to make a difference. And we do manage to lift our gaze to anticipate the next generation of threats and risks.
That’s why I am so proud of the talented, selfless, often courageous MI5 people who show up, day after day, night after night, year after year, to take on these threats.
They give their all. They do so behind the scenes, mostly unthanked. Which, in a way, is fitting.
As one of Stella Rimington’s granddaughters said in a tribute paid at her funeral, “Quiet service is often the most powerful kind”.
Thank you.”
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