The PRC is Signaling its First Moves

From the size of their navy, to the inroads the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been making from the Western Hemisphere and Pacific Island nations that used to be seen as USA’s backyard, the PRC made it abundantly clear that its goal to replace the USA and its allies as the lead force in the global order.

For the most base of reasons of profit and political convenience, our nations’ governmental and business elite have sleepwalked their nations into a significant disadvantage should the PRC decide in the next decade to go kinetic in the Western Pacific.

This has not been done unseen. Dating back to the Coffee Klatch era in the Clinton Administration, those with a realist understanding of what the PRC wanted—and an understanding of history—tried to warn what was coming. But, there were profits to make, cute theories cultivated in faculty lounges that needed to be defended, and hard work to be avoided.

Slowly, accelerating in the last half-decade, what few China Doves that remained increasingly have nothing to point to but their dreams and feeling. Red in tooth and claw, the PRC dragon increasingly feels little need to be subtle. From Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, old school imperial bullying in the West Philippine Sea, to every bit of telcom equipment they can place, the PRC is flaunting their move to take power over the world order that the major Western and Western-aligned nations, especially the USA, spent underwriting over the last century.

How brazen are they being? Let’s look at the telcom part mentioned above as outlined in the exceptionally article in WSJ, How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons:

The message from President Biden’s national security adviser was startling.

Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies’ help to root out the intruders.

What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China’s hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too.

This next bit makes my point raised at the top of the post:

The two massive hacking operations have upended the West’s understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors—once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars.

I’m sorry, but if by the fall of 2023 this “upended” what you thought the PRC wanted, then in the name of all that is holy, please find some other sector of the economy to make your living than national security. Learn to code, weld, sell real estate…something productive. You are a danger to your nation in this line of work.

U.S. computer networks are a “key battlefield in any future conflict” with China, said Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, who closely tracked China’s hacking operations against American infrastructure.

Imagine in 1940, adults in national security having to tell people,

Japan’s access to Sea Lines of Communication are a “key battlefield in any future conflict” with Japan, said Chad Scotland, a former top U.S. maritime economics official at the War Department, who closely tracked Japan’s naval activity in the western Pacific.

Perhaps knowledge is this area is not as well known as I thought. If not, more faster, please.

If you can’t see D+0, I’m not sure I can help you:

In the infrastructure attacks, which began at least as early as 2019 and are still taking place, hackers connected to China’s military embedded themselves in arenas that spies usually ignored, including a water utility in Hawaii, a port in Houston and an oil-and-gas processing facility.

Investigators, both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the private sector, found the hackers lurked, sometimes for years, periodically testing access. At a regional airport, investigators found the hackers had secured access, and then returned every six months to make sure they could still get in. Hackers spent at least nine months in the network of a water-treatment system, moving into an adjacent server to study the operations of the plant. At a utility in Los Angeles, the hackers searched for material about how the utility would respond in the event of an emergency or crisis. The precise location and other details of the infrastructure victims are closely guarded secrets, and couldn’t be fully determined.

American security officials said they believe the infrastructure intrusions—carried out by a group dubbed Volt Typhoon—are at least in part aimed at disrupting Pacific military supply lines and otherwise impeding America’s ability to respond to a future conflict with China, including over a potential invasion of Taiwan.

The PRC has studied the mistakes made by Japan in WWII…and don’t seem to want to repeat them.

… a hacking group—this one known as Salt Typhoon—linked to Chinese intelligence burrowed into U.S. wireless networks as well as systems used for court-appointed surveillance.

They were able to access data from over a million users, and snapped up audio from senior government officials, including some calls with Trump by accessing the phone lines of people whose phones he used. They also targeted people involved in Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

They were also able to swipe from Verizon and AT&T a list of individuals the U.S. government was surveilling in recent months under court order, which included suspected Chinese agents.

It is almost as if they were getting more information than they could process.

Remember, you aren’t being paranoid if people are actually trying to get you.

Several senior lawmakers and U.S. officials have switched from making traditional cellphone calls and texts to using encrypted apps such as Signal, for fear that China may be listening in…

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In late December, in response to the Salt Typhoon campaign, federal cybersecurity officials published new guidance recommending the public use end-to-end encryption for communications, and said text-based multifactor authentication for account logins should be avoided in favor of app-based methods.

…

U.S. officials have warned for more than a decade about fast-evolving threats in cyberspace, from ransomware hackers locking computers and demanding payments to state-directed thefts of valuable corporate secrets. They also raised concerns about the use of Chinese equipment, including from telecom giants Huawei and ZTE, arguing they could open a back door to unfettered spying. In December, the Journal reported that U.S. authorities are investigating whether the popular home-internet routers made by China’s TP-Link, which have been linked to cyberattacks, pose a national-security risk.

But Beijing didn’t need to leverage Chinese equipment to accomplish most of its goals in the massive infrastructure and telecom attacks, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the investigation. In both hacks, China exploited a range of aging telecom equipment that U.S. companies have trusted for decades.

That is just a sample from the first third of the article. Read it all.

Let us hope that we take our own information security as serious as the PRC is in exploiting the lack of it.