Yesterday during a talk at Vanderbilt University, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of a potential threat against U.S. national security posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Wray stated:
The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist.
According to Wray, CCP hackers are targeting infrastructure, and not interested in financial gain:
“When one victim company set up a honeypot — essentially, a trap designed to look like a legitimate part of a computer network with decoy documents — it took the hackers all of 15 minutes to steal data related to the control and monitoring systems, while ignoring financial and business-related information, which suggests their goals were even more sinister than stealing a leg up economically,”
Wray warns U.S. critical infrastructure is vulnerable to CCP hackers, stating, “It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing.”
