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The United States has been tracking serious cyberattacks on US infrastructure for years.
Those attacks are hardly minor–the intrusions threaten all our computer-linked infrastructure, which in the great Venn Diagram of life means basically all our electrical generation, water distribution, pipelines, power plants, communications, and even medical systems.
Computers and software make life more efficient is many ways, but there is always a trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Our current infrastructure is about as brittle as it has been in a very long time, and China has a hammer they can use to shatter it.
They want us to know that.
https://t.co/rXpDvcXaXy— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) April 10, 2025
The Wall Street Journal has a scoop about that last bit. For years the Chinese have vigorously denied that the Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party had anything to do with the campaign to infiltrate and disrupt our cybersystems, so when they admitted that they took responsibility for all those intrusions, it took the Biden administration by surprise.
Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.
The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said.
The first-of-its-kind signal at a Geneva summit with the outgoing Biden administration startled American officials used to hearing their Chinese counterparts blame the campaign, which security researchers have dubbed Volt Typhoon, on a criminal outfit, or accuse the U.S. of having an overactive imagination.
U.S. officials went public last year with unusually dire warnings about the uncovered Volt Typhoon effort. They publicly attributed it to Beijing trying to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks so its army could quickly detonate damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict.
The Chinese official’s remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.
