Experts warn U.S. is failing to respond quickly to China’s global cybercrime campaign

03/15/2024 / By Ava Grace

Experts believe that the United States is failing to respond swiftly to counter the threat of China’s communist regime’s worldwide campaign of cybercrime.

This comes as a cache of leaked documents that surfaced in late February directly implicated the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in an extensive overseas campaign of cyber espionage.

Retired U.S. Army Col. John Mills, who previously served as the director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs at the Department of Defense, emphasized the importance of speed in the current era of cyber threats.

“You have to presume a breach, and that the threat is inside. Looking at it from that perspective, it’s all about speed of identification, speed of ejection. The U.S. government is not good at that,” said Mills. (Related: Leaked documents from a Chinese contractor offers rare insight into how the CCP operates its cyberwarfare and surveillance operations.)

Mills warned that there are a lot of “industrial control systems and critical infrastructure” that are just very difficult to properly secure because they use “a lot of obscure software programs and languages that are just not very well understood, and they don’t scale as far as being able to secure them.”

“The ‘Internet of Things’ and critical infrastructure – that is still a very porous, vulnerable area,” he added. “It’s very tailored and customized, which is inefficient and expensive, and that’s the reality of critical infrastructure.”

China’s global cybercrime campaign aimed at destabilizing its adversaries like the U.S.

The leaked documents reveal that the CCP’s global cybercrime campaign is aimed at destabilizing its adversaries and preparing China for a potential war with the United States.

The documents belonged to a criminal hacking group called I-Soon, which operates as a legitimate business in China. The leaked files revealed the group’s infiltration into government departments in India, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, as well as into organizations affiliated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Some of the documents verified by the Associated Press show that the majority of the group’s clients are based within China’s regional security bureaus and the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security.

Mills said the revelation was “predictable,” and that CCP authorities have a long history of conducting illicit tasks in addition to their formal duties.

“The CCP and the government, which is one [and] the same thing, knew these people were moonlighting. This is part of the culture of corruption [in China],” said Mills.

The I-Soon leaks surfaced amid a wider flurry of CCP-backed cyber activity, in which the regime successfully infiltrated both U.S. critical infrastructure and the defense ministry of the Netherlands.

Volt Typhoon, a malware used to infiltrate U.S. systems and target critical infrastructure, was discovered last year, having been implanted as part of a wider effort to pre-position for a military conflict. The malware also threatened the physical safety of Americans by targeting water, energy, rail, airline and port traffic-control systems, according to intelligence leaders.

Casey Fleming, CEO of the risk advisory firm BlackOps Partners, said that the Volt Typhoon initiative was part of the CCP’s strategy of unrestricted warfare through which it aims to secure military advantage over the United States through non-military means.

“The CCP is hyper-focused on weakening the U.S. from all angles to win the war without fighting,” Fleming told the Epoch Times. “This is what World War III looks like. It’s the speed of technology, the stealth of unrestricted warfare, and no rules.”

Watch this video of political commentator Glenn Beck discussing how Chinese cyber activities are fueling the secret war the CCP is waging on American soil.

This video is from the Galactic Storm channel on Brighteon.com.