As this New York Times front page article attests, U.S. officials believe the Chinese cyber attack groups, Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, are still in American telecommunications networks. The author of the article, David Sanger, calls it “the most significant assault on American critical infrastructure in the digital age.” He adds: “Officials have said they do not believe that the Chinese hackers have been ousted from the networks of at least eight telecommunications firms, including the nation’s two largest, Verizon and AT&T. That suggests that China’s hackers retain the capability to escalate.”
This is truly scary. Why haven’t the companies responded? The answer is all about money. These companies operate some older, legacy systems and in general they have not taken national security seriously. That hasn’t been part of their perceived job descriptions–they are more focused on quarterly profits. As I learned in co-writing Battlefield Cyber, the CEOs of these companies tell government officials, “If it’s a national security threat, why don’t you (the government) pay to fix it?” Of course, that’s a difficult sell to the national security crowd. Why should we pay money to fix a private sector company’s infrastructure?
Until we Americans can overcome that central dilemma, we will continue to be essentially wide open, waiting for a massive disruption to occur. As Sanger quotes incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz as saying, the hackers “are literally putting cyber time bombs on our infrastructure, our water systems, our grids, even our ports.”
