FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a dire warning on Thursday, saying that China-sponsored hackers are already on US territory and no longer just over the horizon.
“They’re upon us now,” Wray signaled during a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
The FBI director further remarked that these CCP-sponsored hackers were able to infiltrate the US critical infrastructure and were just waiting for the right moment to wreak havoc.
“A few years ago, we might have said China represented the most significant long-term threat,” he said.
“That’s no longer the best way to describe the danger.”
“The hacking campaign, known as Volt Typhoon, has embedded itself successfully in several American critical infrastructure companies that include telecommunications, energy and water, and others, Wray said.
“Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”
Before his speech at Vanderbilt University, Wray also warned lawmakers in February on Capitol Hill that Chinese hackers are aiming to “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities.”
“There has been far too little public focus on the fact that PRC [People’s Republic of China] hackers are targeting our critical infrastructure—our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems—and the risk that poses to every American requires our attention now,” Wray told congressmen.
He further remarked that “literally every day,” these hackers are “actively attacking our economic security, engaging in wholesale theft of our innovation, and our personal and corporate data.”
“And they don’t just hit our security and economy. They target our freedoms, reaching inside our borders, across America, to silence, coerce, and threaten our citizens and residents,” Wray testified.
Meanwhile, the Chinese embassy in Washington denied Wray’s claims and alleged that the United States is “politicizing cybersecurity issues.”
According to Wray, US cyber intelligence has already flagged these attacks since 2011 and knows that CCP-backed hackers are aiming at US oil and gas companies.
He further noted that these hacking groups were bolstered by the CCP’s military and intelligence agencies’ utilization of artificial intelligence to speed up their operations.
“To give you a sense of the scale of China’s cyber activity, if all of the FBI’s cyber agents and cyber intelligence analysts focused exclusively on China—and not on ransomware, Iran, or Russia—Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1,” Mr. Wray said.
“And that’s probably a conservative estimate.”
