Thwarting cyberattacks from China is DHS’s top infrastructure security priority

Combatting “cyber and different threats posed by the People’s Republic of China” (PRC) is simply a apical precedence for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) done the extremity of 2025, according to a guidance document the section released past Thursday. The papers describes a “whole-of-society effort” to support captious infrastructure from extracurricular threats, and China is astatine the apical of the list.

Other priorities see managing the “evolving risks” of artificial quality and different emerging technologies, mitigating proviso concatenation vulnerabilities, preparing for clime change-related risks to captious infrastructure, and addressing dependency connected satellite-based services and communications.

“From the banking strategy to the electrical grid, from wellness attraction to our nation’s h2o systems and more, we beryllium connected the reliable functioning of our captious infrastructure arsenic a substance of nationalist security, economical security, and nationalist safety,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said successful a statement. 

Per the memo, the national authorities and quality assemblage spot China arsenic 1 of the biggest risks to nationalist information and are peculiarly acrophobic astir China’s quality and “willingness” to behaviour cyberattacks connected US infrastructure. The memo besides warns astir imaginable threats from “other malign ‘gray zone’ activities,” including fiscal investments, “traditional espionage,” and insider threats. 

This April, FBI Director Christopher Wray said hackers linked to the Chinese authorities had accessed captious US infrastructure and were waiting “for conscionable the close infinitesimal to woody a devastating blow.” In a code astatine the Vanderbilt Summit connected Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Wray said hackers with the cyber radical Volt Typhoon had breached respective American companies successful the telecom, energy, and h2o sectors.

DHS established a China Working Group successful 2020 to code the “intensifying threat” of China’s “malign enactment successful the trade, cybersecurity, immigration, and intelligence spot domains,” then-acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf said astatine the time. 

In 2022, DHS published a “strategic enactment plan” connected combatting China’s threats to nationalist security, looking astatine everything from migration violations to intelligence spot rights violations. Action items included looking into ways to grow commercialized “with fledgling spot sectors and like-minded economical partners, including India and Taiwan” and prioritizing efforts to support US infrastructure from “malicious PRC cyber activity.” And past year, Mayorkas announced a departmentwide 90-day “PRC Threats Sprint.” Like the 2022 plan, the sprint emphasized the request to support captious infrastructure against imaginable cyberattacks, arsenic good arsenic a committedness to utilizing DHS’s migration enforcement apparatus to place “illicit travelers” from China who travel to the US to “collect intelligence, bargain intelligence property, and harass dissidents.”

Congress has besides go progressively hawkish connected China. In 2013, the House Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee connected cybersecurity held a hearing connected the threats China, Russia, and Iran posed to US infrastructure. The legislature effort to ban TikTok unless it divests from its Beijing-based genitor institution is mostly rooted successful nationalist information concerns. Earlier this month, the House Committee connected Homeland Security advanced a bill that would block DHS from buying batteries from six Chinese companies.