(OPINION) In the wake of House subcommittee hearings this week on threats coming from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the FBI and lawmakers are warning of the cybersecurity threat that the CCP poses to U.S. infrastructure.
Over the last year, the size and scope of the CCP’s cyberwarfare tactics have begun to come to light, which U.S. officials have publicly admitted to being stunned by.
On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray repeated his warnings from January (when he stated that China’s hackers are “wreaking havoc” on American infrastructure), remarking that the CCP is “the defining threat of our generation.”
He continued, “China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation combined. If each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intelligence analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1.”
The ongoing hacking campaign, known already as Volt Typhoon, has gained access to American telecommunications, energy, water, and other companies, including pipeline operators.
Wray charged China is assembling the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing. … it plans to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”
The report explained, “Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China’s broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan.”
In February, it was the Epoch Times that reported on CISA documentation that the Communist regime is installing “malware” in key U.S. systems in preparation for the chance that there would be a major conflict.
“A Feb. 7 advisory released by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) seeks ‘to warn critical infrastructure organizations’ about China’s attempts to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy vital U.S. facilities,” explained a report in the Epoch Times.
CISA warned, “Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors are seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States.”
The agency warned that the threatening computer code was intended “to launch destructive cyber-attacks that would jeopardize the physical safety of Americans and impede military readiness.”
Examples of the CCP’s cyberwarfare campaign on the U.S. abound.
A recent report from The Heritage Foundation catalogs how CCP has hackers infiltrated “key sectors including communications, energy, and water,” and “may have the ability to access heating and air conditioning systems to overheat data servers, to cause blackouts by disrupting control rooms that regulate water and electricity, and to manipulate surveillance cameras at some of these facilities.”
In February, a report revealed that Chinese hackers had been embedded inside U.S. infrastructure IT environments for five years without being detected to extract sensitive information.
In addition, the military is among the prime targets of the CCP’s cyberwarfare campaign. In 2013, it was discovered that a China-backed military hacking group known as APT1 “had pilfered military contractor designs such as the Patriot, THAAD and Aegis missile systems, as well as aircraft designs including the F/A-18 Super Hornet, V-22 Osprey, Black Hawk helicopter and F-35 joint strike fighter.”
Government email servers have also been exploited by CCP hackers, and the Biden administration has hammered Microsoft for its lax cybersecurity policies. (READ MORE)
