How China is Hacking America

The sheer scale of China’s latest attempt to infiltrate U.S. infrastructure has surprised the entire cybersecurity industry, an expert has said.

Daniel Cuthbert, who sat on the UK Government Cyber Security Advisory Board, said the Volt Typhoon hacking system is bigger than anything China has unleashed before.

The U.S. government says it is designed to cripple U.S. computer systems if America and China go to war.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. committee hearing on January 31 that Volt Typhoon was “the defining threat of our generation”.

It has already been used in attempted hacking on emergency services, military installations and satellites.

“In essence, Volt Typhoon is a campaign, albeit a very large one, by Chinese state agents actively gaining access to industrial control systems and other critical national infrastructure,” Cuthbert told Newsweek.

“Similar campaigns have been happening for a very long time, but I think what has surprised many, including myself, was the sheer scale of the campaign.”

Cuthbert said it was a mistake to think that China was only targeting the U.S.

“It doesn’t just pose a threat to the U.S. It poses a threat to anybody in the CNI [Critical National Infrastructure] world. That world has a large number of rather complex problems when it comes to security that are not trivial to fix. I feel this is where considerable investment is needed to ensure that our CNI globally is as secure as possible,” he said.

Newsweek sought email comment from the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C.

Cuthbert believes Volt Typhoon is difficult to defeat because it uses “living off the land” technology.

According to the CrowdStrike cybersecurity company, unlike traditional malware attacks, living off the land hacking systems do not use any of their own files. That means they do not require an attacker to install any code or scripts within the target system.

Instead, it uses tools that are already present in the computer system, such as Windows Management, which makes detection much more difficult and allows hackers to stay unnoticed within a computer system for months or even years.

On February 7, the U.S. government’s cybersecurity…