Cybersecurity
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The Bottom Line
Cyberattacks, cyber-terrorism and cyber-espionage pose an increasingly significant risk to the United States. It’s critical that we have a comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy that thoroughly protects everything from our infrastructure to our intelligence databases.
Cyber threats are more ominous now that we have become increasingly reliant on technology, and information technology and physical infrastructure have become more interconnected. Malicious cyber actors, nation-states and just plain bad people use cyberspace to do everything from steal information to disrupt the delivery of basic services to interfere in our elections, not to mention other crimes such as child pornography, financial fraud, and intellectual property theft.
Cyber warfare creates an entirely new battlefield, and it’s going to take all our current cyber capabilities plus many new resources to identify our vulnerabilities and prepare our defense.
The “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history – by far,” according to U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), transpired between 2020 and 2024 when Chinese government-affiliated actors launched an espionage campaign that compromised over a dozen telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Lumen Technologies. Targeting U.S. wiretap systems, the hack gave the Chinese unparalleled access to our foreign-intelligence surveillance systems.
Salt Typhoon, as the group is referred to by investigators, hacked mainly the phones of people involved in government or political activity – including Donald Trump, JD Vance and Kamala Harris – as well as highly sensitive electronic communications that internet service providers collect based on U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders.
Other Chinese “typhoon” threats include Volt Typhoon, which targets U.S. infrastructure, and Flax Typhoon, which targets routers, cameras and other internet-connected consumer devices (“typhoon” is the name used by Microsoft to differentiate between various Chinese-backed cyber campaigns/threats).
Not to be outdone, Russia’s guerilla-style brand of cyber asymmetric-warfare has been targeting the United States for decades. Moonlight Maze, Russia’s three-year covert operation to hack into U.S. governmental agencies, started in 1996 and penetrated both NASA and the Pentagon. In fact, Moonlight Maze is the reason the U.S. Cyber Command center was created in the first place.