A brand new report published by security officials in the United States has revealed the endgame hackers working with the Chinese military are seeking to accomplish with cyberattacks on critical systems in the country conducted over the course of the last 12 months, and it’s highly disturbing. What these miscreants want to do is create societal chaos in the lives of the American public. That’s right, China is targeting you and I, not just our government, in their attacks on infrastructure, which means they view the average citizen as a target and an enemy. Destabilize society, then you do the same to the government. It’s a two-for-one deal.
“The hacks appeared to be made with an intention toward some future action rather than disrupting systems in the moment and suggest that the People’s Liberation Army of China is testing its and the United States’ capabilities in case hostilities break out over Taiwan, experts told The Washington Post,“ the Daily Wire reported. “One of the agencies responsible for monitoring and combating foreign cyber threats is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security.”
“It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict, to either prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States — to affect our decision-making around a crisis,” CISA executive director Brandon Wales tells the Post. “That is a significant change from Chinese cyber activity from seven to 10 years ago that was focused primarily on political and economic espionage.”
What kind of targets are hackers working to take down? One of them was a water utility in the state of Hawaii, along with one oil and gas pipeline. Chinese hackers also launched cyberattacks on an independent Texas powergrid. However, much to their chagrin, their assaults didn’t result in much disruption, but it seems, according to the Daily Wire, the miscreants were keeping their top priority the creation of pathways into the systems they could utilize for attacks in the future.
“You’re trying to build tunnels into your enemies’ infrastructure that you can later use to attack. Until then you lie in wait, carry out reconnaissance, figure out if you can move into industrial control systems or more critical companies or targets upstream. And one day, if you get the order from on high, you switch from reconnaissance to attack,” Joe McReynolds, a China security studies fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said during his interview with the Post.
Here’s more from the report:
Tensions have risen recently over China’s aggressive posturing and actions in the Indo-Pacific region, including threatening to take over Taiwan. The Biden administration has officially maintained a position of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, neither committing nor declining to come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of an attack from China.
In February, the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon after it traversed the continental United States. China claimed that the balloon was an unmanned civilian airship used for meteorological study that blew off course. Another spy balloon appeared over Taiwan last week, according to the Taiwanese defense ministry. The appearance of the new spy balloon comes months after U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believed that China had suspended its spy balloon program over the incident with the U.S.
If you thought China and the U.S. were friends, I’d suggest you rethink your position and do some more research on the current state of geopolitical relationships. President Biden has also made matters worse since taking the Oval Office in January 2021. You can almost guarantee that Trump would not have allowed things to devolve this much had he been in office for a second term.