Established as one of the original 14 semi-autonomous provincial MSS units in 1983, the department is involved in expansive human intelligence efforts, information operations, and cyber espionage campaigns.

"[3] In 2014, the GSSD announced that its counterintelligence unit had disrupted an operation by a foreign adversary which had recruited a Chinese citizen through an online chat room.

The government said the pair were first noticed as they penetrated U.S. Department of Energy systems in the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at the Hanford Site in Washington State but tracked them attacking other targets.

The FBI disclosed the group's suspected headquarters, located at Room 1103, Huapu Square West Tower, Guangzhou, Guangdong.

Between February and March 2018, hackers from the Guangdong State Security Department compromised the computers of a US Navy contractor, stealing classified information relating to undersea warfare, including plans to equip US submarines with supersonic anti-ship missiles.

The contractor improperly stored material relating to the SEA DRAGON supersonic anti-ship missile development, as well as the navy submarine development unit's electronic library, submarine radio room information, information on the navy's cryptographic systems, and signal and sensor data on the contractor's unclassified network.

[11] In January 2018, the FBI arrested former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, charging him with unlawful possession of defense information.

[14] According to the indictment, he met two officers of the Guangdong State Security Department in Shenzhen, and they gave him "a gift of $100,000 cash in exchange for his cooperation", with the promise that "they would take care of him for life".

According to court papers, Lee's business partner in Hong Kong arranged meetings and passed messages from Chinese intelligence officers to him.

On the eve of the 2015 Ma–Xi meeting in Singapore, Li was traded back to China in a spy swap, in exchange for the release of MIB agents Chu Kung-hsun and Hsu Chang-kuo, who were kidnapped by the MSS in Vietnam in 2006.

[24][25] In the 1990s, Xu Tianmin (许天民), a Ministry of Public Security official who transferred to the Guangdong SSD, was sent to British Hong Kong as a handler for a double agent working for Taiwanese intelligence in the city.

A photo from the banquet shows Michael unknowingly seated beside Wang Shuren, a senior MSS spy who worked in the Chinese embassy in Cambodia before building a specialization in smuggling agents into Hong Kong.