Efforts from federal agencies and warnings from the Biden administration have done little to stop Chinese hacking campaigns targeting U.S. computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts.
The White House censured China last year after a government-linked hacking group, Volt Typhoon, was found to have accessed U.S. systems, leading U.S. agencies and infrastructure companies to race to seal networks such as those that operate the nation's power grids and transportation industry, reports Politico.
But Microsoft director of threat intelligence strategy Sherrod DeGrippo, speaking from the BlackHat hacking conference in Las Vegas this week, said the efforts aren't working.
"Volt Typhoon is active to this day," DeGrippo told Politico. "Have they stopped? Absolutely not. Will they stop? Doubt it."
Meanwhile, there are strong indications that if the Chinese invade Taiwan, it will use cyberattacks to keep the United States at bay if it feels it's giving military assistance to the island nation.
Several federal agencies, including the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and cyber agencies in allied nations have become more vocal about the threat posed by the Chinese.
Security alerts have been issued that allow top agency officials to speak about the hackers and bring up the issue with China during recent visits.
Microsoft, one of the first companies to flag Volt Typhoon publicly last year, issued a report about how its hackers got into networks in the U.S. territory of Guam, which is key to the deployment of troops if there is a war with China.
There were also compromises found in other organizations, including construction and maritime operations.
"Generally, there has not been a change in the targeting at all,” DeGrippo said. "I would say we’re about the same volume, but what the story is there to me … is actually the consistency and the persistence. We don’t see big changes there."
Alex Stamos, chief information security officer of cyber group SentinelOne and former chief security officer at Meta, said this week that efforts from the Biden administration against the Chinese have not changed anything, and that scares him.
However, it is expensive for companies that have been targeted to deal with the intrusions, or even spot them.
Volt Typhoon's hackers infiltrate networks to maintain access that allows operations to be impacted in the event of a conflict, not to steal data.
"They are intentionally being very quiet," said Stamos. "It is very hard to catch them. It means you have to turn your sensitivity way up because what is considered malicious here is something that is much more subtle.”
Meanwhile, the recent global outage from a flawed update of CrowdStrike was not a cyberattack, but Stamos said that the problems were a warning.
"The Chinese would love to be that successful on day one — of the invasion of Taiwan, of disrupting the ability of the United States to respond to an invasion," he said. "I think we got a bit of a dress rehearsal on what the start of World War III would look like."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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