Chinese hackers determined to ‘wreak havoc’ on key US infrastructure, FBI chief warns
- Water treatment plants, the electric grid and transport hubs are targets of state-sponsored hacking operations, FBI Director Christopher Wray tells lawmakers
- The US also announces that it has disabled hundreds of US-based small office and home routers hijacked by Chinese state hackers
China’s hackers are focusing on infrastructure to “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities”, Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told lawmakers during a US House hearing on Wednesday.
Wray’s remarks came hours after the FBI, in partnership with the US Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), identified and disabled “hundreds of routers” hacked by a group known as Volt Typhoon, which US security agencies believe be financed by the Chinese state.
The group developed and distributed malware that allowed China to exploit critical infrastructure such as “communications, energy, transportation and water sectors”, Wray said.
He added that the operation was part of Beijing’s strategy to “find and prepare to destroy or degrade the civilian critical infrastructure that keeps us safe and prosperous”.
“The PRC cyber threat is made vastly more dangerous by the way they knit cyber into a whole-of-government campaign against us,” Wray told members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.