Hackers backed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) threaten to disrupt the daily lives of Americans. As FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed during a congressional hearing I led earlier this year, these hackers could “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities.” Rather than wait and react to a future crisis, we must make proactive preparations before it is too late.
As Chairman Xi Jinping once put it, he wants the PRC to emerge as a “cyber superpower” and “overcome the superior with the inferior” by exerting global influence through information warfare. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has focused on espionage, stealing IP from our companies, and collecting private data. In 2015, hackers stole millions of sensitive records within the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), leading to a congressional investigation and the resignation of top OPM leaders. Two years later, another operation exfiltrated the identifying data of hundreds of millions of Americans from Equifax, one of the nation’s biggest credit reporting agencies. And in 2020, Marriot announced that attackers pilfered the credit card and passport numbers of millions of customers.
Beyond just a litany of cyber operations, these attacks were the application of the CCP’s laser focus on overcoming American cyber capabilities to ultimately achieve “information dominance,” which entails gaining operational advantage through electronic warfare, network warfare, and psychological warfare to collect, control, and exploit information.
Read the rest of the story at Federal Times, here.
