US sets the stage for further hardening of its China position

‘How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons’, headlines a major piece published by the WSJ over the weekend. Much of the piece summarises what is already known about the massive Salt Typhoon cyber attack, which apparently penetrated most of the country’s telecoms infrastructure.

But further down the piece we are offered new revelations courtesy of those trusty anonymous ‘people familiar with the matter’. That’s nearly always code for government representatives, often from some of the countless three-letter agencies whose job it is to prevent this sort of thing happening. When it does, these shadowy sources typically deflect towards private sector negligence and, of course, appeal for even bigger budgets to further aid them in their heroic efforts.

Hence the WSJ was informed that “the hackers exploited unpatched network devices from security vendor Fortinet and compromised large network routers from Cisco Systems. In at least one case, they took control of a high-level network management account that wasn’t protected by multifactor authentication, a basic safeguard.” AT&T was also singled out and none of those companies were inclined to comment when asked.

The story does appear to contain fresh revelations about telcos affected, with Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream added to the hall of shame. National security adviser Jake Sulliven is then quoted as inferring that vulnerabilities only exist in the absence of mandatory cybersecurity requirements, as if companies don’t already have a massive interest in such things.

Elsewhere, Bloomberg heard from the US government that the US-owned pacific island of Guam is also the target of Chinese cyber machinations. The ultimate aim of this, we’re told, is to weaken America’s ability to defend Taiwan, which China has supposedly been on the verge of invading for decades. The defence of such an attack is perennially put forward as a justification for the further enlargement of the gargantuan US military budget.

Meanwhile the Washington Post has published an excerpt from a book written by one of its journalists that documents the history of Huawei. Much of the excerpt reflects on how, despite the best efforts of the US state, Huawei continues to flourish. The piece is fairly balanced on the matter of US vs China, noting that while Huawei may well be heavily influenced by the Chinese state, Western countries are hardly free from such state intrusion into the private sector themselves.

For all the vested interests represented in these stories, it now seems very unlikely that the Salt Typhoon attacks were a fabrication of the US security state. Continued denials by the Chinese government, therefore, look increasingly ridiculous and serve to provide even more ammunition for China hawks. Attacks like this make it increasingly hard to argue in favour of de-escalation and more cordial relations between the two global superpowers.

So, sadly, the geopolitical path seems set for the foreseeable future. America will continue to sanction China, which in turn will retaliate. All this will serve to entrench a new, bipolar world order in which the technologies used by each will become increasingly incompatible, further accelerating the process of mutual alienation and distrust. What a shame.