FBI director warns that Chinese hackers are resolute in causing chaos to US critical infrastructure.

During a recent testimony to House lawmakers, FBI Director Chris Wray issued a new cautionary statement regarding China’s global aspirations, revealing that Chinese government hackers are actively focusing on vital infrastructure such as water treatment plants, the electrical grid, and transportation systems within the United States.

Underscoring the threat, the Justice Department and FBI announced just before the hearing that they had disrupted a botnet of hundreds of small office and home routers owned by private US citizens and businesses that have been hijacked by Chinese state hackers to cover their tracks and hide. their origin when they seed the malware.

Speaking before a Chinese Communist Party House committee, Wray said there had been “too little public focus” on the cyber threat affecting “some Americans.”

“Chinese hackers are positioning themselves on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real harm to American citizens and communities if or when China decides it’s time to strike,” Wray said.

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Jen Easterly, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division, expressed a similar sentiment at the hearing.

“This is a world where a major crisis halfway across our planet could endanger American lives here at home by breaking our pipelines, cutting our telecommunications, contaminating our water systems and crippling our modes of transportation. All to ensure that they can cause societal panic and chaos and hinder our ability to respond,” he said.

The comments echo assessments by outside cybersecurity firms, including Microsoft, which said in May that state-sponsored Chinese hackers had attacked critical US infrastructure and could lay the technical foundation for potential disruptions to critical links between the US and Asia during future crises. .

That operation, attributed to a hacker group called Volt Typhoon, has now been halted after FBI and Justice Department officials obtained search and seizure warrants in federal court in Texas. Hackers infiltrated targets through a variety of avenues, including cloud and Internet service providers, masquerading as normal traffic.

In recent years, the United States has become more aggressive in its efforts to disrupt and dismantle both criminal and state-sponsored cyber operations. But state-sponsored hackers, especially Chinese and Russian ones, are good at adapting and finding new methods and avenues of intrusion.

“Today and literally every day, they are actively attacking our financial security and stealing our innovation and our personal and business information wholesale,” Wray said of China.

US authorities have long been concerned about such hackers hiding in US-based infrastructure, and the end-of-life Cisco and NetGear routers used by the Volt Typhoon were easy prey because the manufacturers no longer supported them with security updates. Because of the urgency, law enforcement officials said, U.S. cyber operators removed the malware from those routers without directly notifying their owners — and added code to prevent reinfection.

A Justice Department official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity in line with government-imposed rules, said authorities had decided to end Operation Volt Typhoon as soon as possible because hackers were using the botnet as a springboard to hide in US Internet traffic. infiltrating critical infrastructure networks ready to exploit this access at a time of their malicious choosing.

China has called the US government’s claims baseless. Beijing has accused the US of “almost daily” and “massive intrusions” against the Chinese government, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin saying last year that “China is the biggest victim of cyber attacks.”

But Gen. Paul Nakasone, the outgoing commander of US Cyber Command, said “responsible cyber actors” will not target civilian infrastructure.

“They have no reason to be in our water,” Nakasone said. “They have no reason to be in our power.”

Testifying before the same committee on Tuesday, Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Obama administration’s defense secretary, said he believed Chinese agents had “planted malware on our own computer networks” and warned. that the Chinese government would use artificial intelligence to spread disinformation.

The committee, chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, was formed last year with a mandate to oppose China and launched in prime time. The Chinese government has opposed the committee, calling on its members to “abandon their ideological bias and zero-sum Cold War mentality.”