China was behind a major cyber attack at a key government institution in the Czech Republic last year, the EU member's intelligence agency said in a report Wednesday. Without providing details, the agency known as NUKIB said the attack "was almost certainly carried out by a state actor or a related group," with "a Chinese actor" the most likely suspect.

More broadly speaking, China and Russia pose the biggest threat to cybersecurity in the Czech Republic, the intelligence agency said in its 2018 report quoted by the Czech News Agency. The Czech foreign ministry in particular has become the target of hackers' attacks. The Czech cabinet is due to discuss the findings on Monday.

NUKIB spokesman Radek Holy told AFP the watchdog would not make the report public until then. In August, the Denik N daily said Russian military intelligence (GRU) was most probably behind the latest attack on the foreign ministry which took place in June. In its report for 2017, the NUKIB warned Russian and Chinese diplomats had stepped up their spying activities on Czech soil owing to Russia's large embassy in Prague and China's huge financial resources. This sparked criticism from pro-Chinese, pro-Russian, anti-Muslim Czech President Milos Zeman who called on the intelligence agency to look for Muslim terrorists on Czech territory instead.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019