Following a suspected recent Iranian cyberattack against a US water treatment facility, government officials are now alleging that the Chinese military has been targeting a number of water and power installations across the country.
Transportation systems are among the apparent targets, with the assaults supposedly being carried out to develop a broader attack playbook that could be deployed if war were to break out between the US and China.
Crippling key infrastructure after an outbreak of hostilities would slow logistics, create potential hysteria within population centers, and ultimately destabilize the nation.
Five Eyes on China
The attacks are being carried out by groups affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, and the groups have infiltrated twenty to thirty sites across the country. according to unnamed officials who spoke to the Washington Post.
Among the targets were water infrastructure in Hawaii, the operator of the Texas power grid, a port on the West Coast, and at least one oil and gas pipeline. While attacks against these sites are serious, apparently no critical control systems were breached.
The group behind many of the attacks, Volt Typhoon, has links to China’s People's Liberation Army and employs a wide range of sophisticated tactics such as 'living off the land techniques', which uses built-in network administration tools to perform attacks.
The group has been referenced in a number of attack reports released by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as being named in warnings released by Microsoft researchers and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
Speaking to the Washington Post, Brandon Wales, the executive director of CISA, said, “It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict, to either prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States — to affect our decision-making around a crisis.
“That is a significant change from Chinese cyber activity from seven to 10 years ago that was focused primarily on political and economic espionage.”
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