China may be biggest hacking, social media threat to U.S.

FORUM Staff

China poses a greater digital security threat to the United States than any other country, according to U.S. officials and a new study released at a March 2019 cyber security conference.

The long-term damage caused by the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) theft of U.S. industry trade secrets and intellectual property will be far greater than the impact of short-lived attacks by other nations, including Iran, North Korea and Russia. U.S. officials emphasized this consensus at the 2019 RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco in early March, according to The Washington Postnewspaper, despite the seeming focus on Russian interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

“Russia’s trying to disrupt the system,” said Chris Krebs, pictured, director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), but “China’s trying to manipulate the system to its ultimate long-term advantage,” The Postreported. Countering PRC digital espionage will be a top agency priority during the next 1.5 years, he said.

The Chinese threat cannot be underestimated, FBI Director Christopher Wray agreed. “There is nothing like it,” Wray said at the conference, which is one of the nation’s largest cyber security forums, with more than 50,000 attendees. “I’m not somebody who is prone to hyperbole, but of all the things that surprised me when I came back into this world, the thing that most shocked me was the breadth, the depth, the scale of the Chinese counterintelligence threat,” Wray said, The Postreported.

In addition to the PRC’s cadre of hackers, China’s offensive social media machinery has the potential to do great harm, according to a new report released the week of the RSA conference.

Recorded Future, a cyber security research firm, compared Russian and Chinese disinformation operations between October 1, 2018, and February 22, 2019, in a new analysis, titled, “Beyond Hybrid War: How China Exploits Social Media to Sway American Opinion.” While the Russian troll farm activated during the 2016 election was estimated to employ 600 people, China’s social media force could be as large as half a million people, according to the report, and much more sophisticated. China’s techniques differ from those of the Russian state, the report found, and also differ from the approaches they use to target the U.S. population because China has different goals in both arenas.

The PRC’s tight rein on its citizens’ internet use allows “techniques that are relatively unique to their own domestic information environment. They don’t use those techniques when targeting Americans in English on U.S. platforms,” Priscilla Moriuchi, a Recorded Future researcher, said, according to the DefenseOne.com website.

More than 80 percent of the PRC’s propaganda campaigns are aimed outside China, the study found, and strive to present the so-called Chinese Dream as unfailing. “The Chinese state has employed a plethora of state-run media to exploit the openness of American democratic society in an effort to insert an intentionally distorted and biased narrative portraying a utopian view of the Chinese government and party,” the report found.

Moriuchi cited the example of the PRC’s spin on its crackdown on minorities in Xinjiang province.

“If you read Chinese content on social media, the Uighurs are happy, content,” Moriuchi said.

For now, PRC social media activity has mainly sought to shape U.S. perceptions about China, the report found, in contrast to Russian activity that strives to undermine faith in democracy and sow division, the report said. For example, the PRC did not attempt a large-scale campaign to influence U.S. voters in the November 2018 midterm elections. “However, on a small scale, we observed all of our researched state-run influence accounts disseminating breaking news and biased content surrounding President Trump and China-related issues,” the report said, noting that Chinese social media posts are very effective at achieving their aims.

While U.S. agencies have some tools, including laws to police hacking, there are fewer ways to counter social media attacks from foreign actors and governments. CSIA’s Krebs told the RSA conference that U.S. efforts to combat non-Russian social media are “an active space and will only get more active,” DefenseOne.com reported.