‘To quantify what we are up against: the PRC has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined,’ said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Communist China operates the world’s largest hacking network, and its malign cyber actors outnumber all the cyber experts of the FBI by a staggering margin, Congress has heard.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on April 11 that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, was “sparing no expense in its attempt to hack, lie, cheat, and steal its way to the top as a global superpower.”
The U.S. intelligence community, he said, was ill-prepared to deal with the threat and lacked the professional staff to counter it.
“To quantify what we are up against: the PRC has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined,” Mr. Wray said in his prepared testimony for the House Appropriations Committee, using an acronym for China’s official name.
“In fact, if each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intelligence analysts focused exclusively on the PRC threat, the PRC’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel at least 50 to 1.”
Mr. Wray’s warning follows several high-profile cyberattacks on the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure believed to have been perpetrated by Chinese state-backed hackers.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory to that effect in February, saying that the CCP is pre-positioning malware in U.S. systems in preparation for a major conflict.
Senior intelligence leaders, including Mr. Wray, testified at the time that the U.S. intelligence community had eradicated Chinese malware from more than 600 routers associated with critical U.S. infrastructure, which they believed could have been used to attack critical U.S. systems in the event of a CCP invasion of Taiwan.
Mr. Wray said at the time that the CCP’s intrusion into U.S. systems was unique for the extent to which it deliberately targeted civilian systems that would directly pose physical harm to U.S. citizens.
