Over the past decade China\u2019s hacking program has grown rapidly, to the point that in 2023 Christopher Wray, then FBI director, noted it was larger than that of every other major nation combined. China\u2019s growing heft and sophistication has yielded success in three main areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first is political espionage, linked primarily to the Ministry of State Security (mss), China\u2019s foreign-intelligence service. Last year it emerged that one group of Chinese hackers, dubbed Salt Typhoon, had breached at least nine American phone companies, giving them access to the calls and messages of important officials. Ciaran Martin, who led Britain\u2019s cyber-defense agency from 2016 to 2020, compares it to the revelations in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a government contractor, that American spy agencies were conducting cyber-espionage on a huge scale. China was \u201cgaining vast access to the nation\u2019s communications via a strategic spying operation of breathtaking audacity,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A second is in areas of little espionage value: hacking that lays the groundwork for sabotage in moments of crisis or war. These efforts are led by the People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA), China\u2019s armed forces. In 2023 it became apparent that a PLA-linked hacking group known as Volt Typhoon had, over several years, burrowed into an extraordinary range of American critical infrastructure, from ports to factories to water-treatment plants, across the continental United States and in strategic American territories such as Guam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of that builds on a third type of hacking: the industrial-scale theft of intellectual property. In 2013 Mandiant, a cyber-threat intelligence firm, which is now part of Google, made waves when it exposed \u201capt1\u201d, the label for a group of hackers linked to the PLA. apt1 was not focused on stealing political secrets or turning off power grids but on stealing blueprints, manufacturing processes and business plans from American firms. A year later, America\u2019s government took the then unprecedented step of indicting five PLA hackers for this activity. Keith Alexander, a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), America\u2019s signals-intelligence service, described this as \u201cthe greatest transfer of wealth in history\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p> I wrote a piece on China\u2019s evolution into a bigger, more sophisticated and more threatening cyber power over the past decade, and particularly in the last few years. I also look at the pivotal role played by China\u2019s private sector ecosystem in that shift. https:\/\/t.co\/EyAyZsgG84<\/a><\/p>— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) March 26, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote>