Kaspersky Lab showcases its solutions on cybersecurity at Hannover Messe, Germany, April 1, 2019.
Russian hackers seem to be dominating many news headlines recently, and former U.S. national security officials have revealed that Beijing’s spying operation is running on a larger scale than Moscow’s.
In a study of Beijing’s hacking prowess, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former U.S. intelligence and national security officials, Foreign Policy 22 reported on Communist Party attacks on U.S. personal data and their consequences over the past decade.
In early 2013, as Xi Jinping prepared to take power, few in the West knew what kind of leader he would be. U.S. intelligence had conducted operations against Beijing with relative confidence. But during the Communist Party’s biggest political transition in decades, U.S. officials have become increasingly impervious to the situation.
A former U.S. national security official said that by hacking the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Communist Party discovered undercover U.S. intelligence officials and removed the CIA’s network on Chinese resources, which became a double disaster that greatly affected the the quality of U.S. insight into the Chinese Communist Party.
The source recalled that the situation became different when there was a marked decline in high-quality intelligence reporting to senior policymakers.
While this was happening, Beijing was significantly upgrading its hacking capabilities, which allowed an unprecedented amount of data to be stolen and fed into an increasingly sophisticated intelligence agency.
Then, as Xi began a full-scale party purge, questions about his character and intentions gradually became clear. “But some people didn’t recognize it as quickly,” the Obama-era official recalled.
Xi Jinping’s increasingly authoritarian approach to rule was no longer a matter of public discussion, people familiar with the matter said. Over the next few years, Xi’s hard-line policies extended to nearly every area of China, with an estimated 1 million Uighurs in Xinjiang detained, surveilled and tortured, massive restrictions on freedom of expression and so-called anti-corruption purges sweeping hundreds of thousands of Chinese officials, but the U.S. government has generally remained reluctant to act.
As Xi Jinping consolidates power, the hacking continues, with Chinese spies ransacking Americans’ data on a near-Olympic scale. In addition to orchestrating the disruption of OPM, hackers linked to Communist Party intelligence agencies have stolen private information on more than 383 million people, including passport and credit card data.
Increasingly outraged by U.S. intelligence and national security officials, the Obama administration then indicted five Chinese Communist Party military hackers who targeted U.S. companies in 2014, the first-ever public prosecution of U.S. hackers from another country, and said it wanted to impose sanctions on Beijing. But senior U.S. officials at the time still believed there were still small key areas where they could work with the Communist Party of China. That led to more opportunities for Beijing to conduct espionage, Foreign Policy said.
Three former officials recalled that even during the widespread Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, the Chinese Communist Party had become the biggest counterintelligence threat to the United States. By the end of the Obama administration, it was clear that the CCP’s hacking capabilities had surpassed those of Russia.
The concern of former senior officials is whether the CCP will weaponize this data they have accumulated over the years. If they did, it would have far-reaching consequences that could be even more devastating than what the Russians have done. Because they have a much larger amount of data than Russia.
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