Worthy Christian News > US News > FBI Director Wray Warns of Chinese Hackers Targeting America’s Infrastructure to ‘Wreak Havoc’

FBI Director Wray Warns of Chinese Hackers Targeting America’s Infrastructure to ‘Wreak Havoc’

by Emmitt Barry, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – During his appearance before the Congressional House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray underscored the escalating threat of Chinese cyberattacks against vital U.S. infrastructure, including electrical grids, pipelines, and critical cyber systems.

The Congressional meeting entitled, “The Chinese Community Party (CCP) Cyber Threat to the American Homeland and National Security,” is focused on the CCP’s growing threat to America’s freedom, and U.S. economy.

“China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike,” Wray said in prepared testimony released by the FBI.

The FBI director stated in his prepared remarks that “there has been far too little public attention” on the fact that Chinese hackers are aiming at critical U.S. infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, electrical grids, oil and natural gas pipelines, and transportation networks.

“And the risk that poses to every American requires our attention — now,” Wray stated in prepared remarks released to the media.

“And they don’t just hit our security and economy. They target our freedoms, reaching inside our borders, across America, to silence, coerce, and threaten our citizens and residents,” Wray warned.

Before the committee, Wray testified, “Just this morning, we [the FBI] announced an operation where we and our partners identified hundreds of routers that had been taken over by the PRC state-sponsored hacking group known as Volt Typhoon. The Volt Typhoon malware enabled China to hide, among other things, pre-operational reconnaissance and network exploitation against critical infrastructure like our communications, energy, transportation and water sectors.”

“And let’s be clear, cyber threats to our critical infrastructure represent real-world threats to our physical safety. So working with our partners, the FBI shut down Volt Typhoon and the access that enabled this operation was an important step, but there’s a whole lot more to do and we need your help to do it,” Wray continued.

During her testimony before the committee, Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that the CCP is gearing up to “induce societal panic” through cyberattacks.

“It is Chinese military doctrine to attempt to induce societal panic in their adversary. And arguably, the Chinese government got a little bit of a taste of this in the aftermath of the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline May of 2021 that shut down gas to the Eastern seaboard for several days,” Easterly testified. She stated that Americans “couldn’t get to work. They couldn’t take their kids to school, get folks to the hospital. It caused a bit of panic.”

“Now imagine that on a massive scale. Imagine not one pipeline, but many pipelines disrupted and telecommunications going down so people can’t use their cell phone. People start getting sick from polluted water. Trains get derailed. Air traffic control system, Port control systems are malfunctioning,” Easterly warned. “This is truly an everything, everywhere all at once scenario.”

The testimony on Capitol Hill is taking place as Congress is actively engaged in the process of revising the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA).

Gen. Nakasone testified before the committee, stating the need to renew Section 702 of FISA.

“Section 702 is the most important authority that the National Security Agency uses every single day to keep Americans safe and to secure our nation,” the General testified.

“As someone who was at the Pentagon on 9/11 to consider that we would return to the days before Section 702 where we couldn’t connect the dots is almost inexplicable to me,” Nakasone continued.

“The other piece that I would add to your question is [Section] 702 is so agile that it provides us an ability to see the Chinese chemicals that are being used to feed fentanyl, which is the scourge of our nation. More than 100,000 Americans lost their lives in 2022. [Section] 702 allows us to identify those precursor issues that saves lives.”

Critics of FISA have warned against the U.S. government’s abuse of power towards its citizens, citing how the FBI ran millions of queries into the lives of Americans.

Jerry Nadler (D-NY) stated that in the last year, the FBI employed “personal identifiers” to conduct searches on U.S. citizens “almost 3.4 million times.” Additionally, other lawmakers noted that nearly 30% of those searches were carried out erroneously.

Nadler also mentioned that U.S. intelligence agencies have “kept us largely in the dark as to how many Americans’ communications are incidentally collected every year.” He cautioned that the volume of data collected in this manner “should give anyone pause.”

Nadler pointed out that the collected data is accessible to entities such as the FBI, which can search the Section 702 database for communications unrelated to national security. He emphasized that such queries are “neither hypothetical nor rare.”

In the same Congressional subcommittee hearing, Jim Jordan (R-OH) questioned Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and other witnesses how many Americas were searched as part of Section 702 investigations into non-citizens, of which they had no answer.

“And then approximately 10,000 people at the Justice Department have the ability to query this incidental collection database without any probable cause,” Jordan stated. “And we know, as Ranking Member Nadler said earlier, there were 3.4 million queries of this database and 30% of those were in error.”