Analyst's note:  The fact that Johathan Evans, the Director General of MI5 is speaking out, what he is saying is really not new.  It is no surprise that China is NOT is acting as a friend.

"In a rare public speech, the head of Britain's domestic spy service said Monday that the West now faces an "astonishing" cyber espionage threat on an "industrial scale" from specific nation states.

"The extent of what is going on is astonishing," said Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, "with industrial-scale processes involving many thousands of people lying behind both state-sponsored cyber espionage and organized cyber crime."

Though Evans did not name any countries, ABC News has separately learned from sources that the U.K., the U.S. and several European allies have a robust discussion underway on how to counter cyber espionage by perhaps the most significant state operator -- China.

[....] "If I may be allowed a Rumsfeld moment," he said, "there are of course the uncertainties we can be certain about -- like terrorism, cyber security challenges and hostile intelligence activities by states. But there are also things we remain uncertain about." During a 2002 press conference, then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a famous distinction between "known knowns," "known unknowns," and "unknown unknowns."