It's interesting to see how this speculative piece keeps popping up, whereas GCHQ's THREE YEAR long hack [1] of Belgium's largest ISP was largely ignored. China bashing is easier than Five-Eyes bashing?
How do you mean 'was largely ignored'? It was headline news for almost a year during the snowden period. It still is discussed occasionally and both us and uk are trusted less by eu countries because of it.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't remember there being this much noise about it. Sure, the rest of the Snowden revelations, but the GCHQ hack seemed largely forgotten. IIRC no charges were ever filed and there was no diplomatic response.
There was a lot of diplomatic fallout but that doesn't take place in public. Reportedly the other EU secret services became more careful about sharing with UK.