FBI Director Chris Wray revealed today China is developing the capability to cause significant damage to our critical infrastructure at a time of their choosing. The only question is the time to launch a catastrophic blow.
“China is developing the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”
According to Wray, an ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully infiltrated several American companies in telecommunications, energy, water, and other critical sectors. 23 pipeline operators are being targeted.
Good think we have a potato in charge (and a compromised one at that) and honest people like Wray and his merry band of agents who have the best interests of the American people in mind.
The Shawn Ryan Show has a former USAF General on talking about some of things he sees that might be coming…infrastructure was mentioned. The scary thing is the amount of weapons and ammo China is stockpiling or has.
Yeah sure…we hear this all the time and maybe true BUT…china makes ~$570 BILLION from USA annually. About 70% of their economy from USA. Their kicking our ass economically and doubt they have to resort to such tactics.
china isn’t set up all that well, certainly not enough to kill the golden goose.
I can’t figure the any angle where china would come out ahead and in fact be set back dramatically if USA cuts ties with them…
I don’t doubt they are scheming something like this but again find it difficult to imagine them doing more than using it like a fear tactic.
I buy the Brandon October Surprise angle and would see the dems be more likely to pull something like this if they feel they are losing their grip…
Oh abso-fvcking-lutely they would. But it won’t be an “October Surprise”, it’ll be literally right before the election so there’s no time to fix the outages. Of course that will take front and center and a week or two later they’ll announce that “Despite the adversity the vote continued on through the disaster! These heroic election workers! Oh, BTW, Biden won again this time with 100 million votes! It’s amazing!”
For YEARS the Chinese have had an entire section of their military devoted to cyber warfare. If you aren’t on point for this shit every single day, might as well not even have a DoD.
If the Chinese government launched a large scale cyber attack on basic services it would probably be timed with a secondary event like an invasion of Taiwan. Otherwise, if there were no secondary event China would deny responsibility and blame criminal hackers. America is sooooo dependent on China… America would eagerly embrace China’s denial.
It baffles me that we allow critical infrastructure in this country to have computer systems controlling operations where those computers are online at all. No “air gap” whatsoever. Gotta improve productivity by automation as much as possible.
Security measures consist of lame ass Authenticator Apps, and making employees change passwords all the time. The only thing this accomplishes is ass pain for employees and job security for various IT desks.
Forcing changes to passwords and not mandating, the use of randomly generated ones, just helps to train the AI to learn what the possible passwords will be.
If you take Covid as a model for their use of weaponization of things, we are facing some kind of apocalyptic breakdown of our infrastructure, instead, they would just screw with it enough to piss everybody off, and allow us to play politics with it, rather than face the external threat.
The media will back up the narrative, people will grumble, but in the end folks will go “well, ah shucks. Guess we’ll try again in 4 years! That’s how you fix the problem.”
I have never understood our nations policy towards China.
They were a 3rd world nation back in the 70’s.
They supplied the North Vietnamese, North Koreans with weapons.
We grant most favored nation status to them. We export our manufacturing base, allow them to counterfeit our goods, hack our computer systems. They import fentanyl and kill our youth. We educate their people on student visas then allow them to comitt industrial espionage when they get jobs at US companies.
Seeing how they see their own people’s LIVES as expendable wholesale, where do you think mere money comes in on acceptable sacrifices for global dominance?