Hackers linked to China have been snooping around critical U.S. infrastructure to put themselves in place to attack "at the right moment," according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage," Wray said Thursday night while speaking at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, reports the New York Post.
He added that the FBI and other federal agencies are working behind the scenes to push back at the threat, which he said is "upon us now."
"[China's] plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray added.
The cyber spying is happening because of the Chinese Communist Party's "aspirations to wealth and power," he explained but said it is difficult to determine if China's actions are taking place to keep the United States from protecting Taiwan.
However, he said China wants to have countermeasures ready for a predicted "crisis between China and Taiwan by 2027."
Specifically, Wray suggested that China is interested in having countermeasures in place for a "crisis between China and Taiwan by 2027."
He added that China has been working aggressively to steal "intellectual property, technology, and research" from almost all major American industries, including 23 pipeline operators.
"The PRC's targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting," Wray said. "It's using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing."
Meanwhile, he said that there are more Chinese-linked hackers than cyber personnel to investigate them in the FBI, and gave an example where the hackers targeted infrastructure controls, not financial data.
"It took the hackers all of 15 minutes to steal data related to the control and monitoring systems, while ignoring financial and business-related information, which suggests their goals were even more sinister than stealing a leg up economically," he said.
Top U.S. law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military are working to stop such attacks, but Wray said the best outcomes happen when companies reach out to their local FBI field office "even before there was any indication of a problem because that put everyone on the same page and contributed to the company's readiness."
Wray earlier this year warned a House Select Committee on China hearing about the threat being posed by China, cautioning at that time that the hackers were eyeing key infrastructure targets, including the electrical grid, transportation systems, oil and natural gas pipelines, and American water treatment plants.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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