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America remains ill-prepared for Chinese hackers targeting critical infrastructure.

It’s a crisis that almost no one is talking about. The Chinese Communist Party is now the world’s preeminent practitioner of cyber warfare. Once notoriously loud and clumsy, the CCP’s hackers have become stealthy and sophisticated. They’re intercepting the calls and texts of our leaders and infiltrating servers at our ports, power plants, and water-treatment facilities. Yet hardly anyone seems to care. When Congress held hearings on cybersecurity late last year, only a handful of journalists bothered to cover them.

In September, the Wall Street Journal revealed to the public a Chinese hacking operation known to American authorities (thanks to the naming conventions of wonks at Microsoft) as Salt Typhoon. Since mid-2023, if not earlier, the group has been assaulting our telecom firms, compromising at least nine of them. It has focused on breaking into wireless networks in and around Washington, D.C. The campaign has won the CCP access to revealing data, such as call, text, and IP logs, on more than 1 million targets. Beijing appears, at minimum, to have gained a thorough understanding of when and how senior American officials communicate with each other, but in many instances, it has obtained the content of calls or texts, as well. The haul likely includes conversations featuring Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, top congressional staffers, and members of the intelligence agencies.

To stop the bleeding, the FBI has instructed federal employees to use end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal, an abrupt and ironic about-face from an agency that has long pressed for backdoor access to such services. It will be some time before FBI officials can again argue for more backdoors with a straight face—especially given that Salt Typhoon has also exploited existing ones that our government uses for domestic snooping. The flaws in these wiretap systems have presumably gifted the CCP invaluable insights into which of its spies we know about and which we don’t.

Maybe the most disturbing thing about Salt Typhoon is that, almost a year after discovering it, Washington still doesn’t have a handle on the problem. No one knows if the hackers have been ejected. Some national security officials worry that we may never know.

Then there is “Volt Typhoon.” Since at least 2019, this group of Chinese hackers has been entering, exploring, and preparing to disrupt computers used to run critical infrastructure. We must assume, at this point, that malware lies dormant in the digital underbelly of our railroads, airports, electricity grid, gas pipelines, and more. Though these hidden bugs could be used in many frightful ways, the CCP seems primarily to be laying the groundwork for the conquest of Taiwan. As it launches an invasion, it will seek to ensure that the U.S. military cannot move troops or supplies or communicate with bases or ships, and that ordinary Americans must sit by without water, power, Internet, or transportation. The goal will be to foist on us both military incapacitation and societal panic, the better to defeat us in war and discredit liberal democracy.

While we cannot know what steps the federal government has taken behind the scenes, the Biden administration’s public posture was unequal to the seriousness of the threat. Chinese companies that assist Salt Typhoon, while doing no business here, have nothing to fear from the Treasury Department’s sanctions. The CCP probably laughed when Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, “sent clear messages” (his words) not about how the U.S. will retaliate for Volt Typhoon now, but about what the U.S. might do if the CCP unleashes its uploaded viruses. That Biden issued an executive order on cybersecurity a mere four days before leaving office underscores his lack of urgency.

The Trump administration must do better. The expert witnesses at a recent hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee broadly agreed on the most urgent tasks. We need more and better planning for “continuity of the economy”—making sure, as one witness put it, that our infrastructure can still “operat[e] in a degraded state” following a cyber-attack. We must streamline federal, state, and local cybersecurity regulations. We should create ROTC-style programs that train computer-science students, then channel them into the federal workforce. Above all, we must maintain our lead in AI research and development. On that front, Trump is off to a good start. He has repealed the Biden administration’s caution-first AI executive order, endorsed a massive AI investment program, and asserted, in one of his own executive orders, that we must “solidify our position as the global leader in AI.”

One of the unsung achievements of Trump’s first term was the creation, in 2018, of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has strengthened the federal government’s cyber defenses and coordinated the private sector’s response to Chinese (and Russian, Iranian, and North Korean) cyber-attacks. CISA drew Trump’s ire when its then-director vouched for the integrity of voting machines in the 2020 election. The agency also angered conservatives by facilitating the removal, from social-media platforms, of content declared disinformation by election officials or Internet researchers. Nearly half of House Republicans once voted to reduce CISA’s funding, and Kristi Noem, the incoming Secretary of Homeland Security, has vowed to “refocus” the agency…..

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