This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel.

I welcome Jack Burnham of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Make revelations about the bad actors in the People's Republic of China that are hard to believe.

You can't make this stuff up, which is why novels only begin to tell the story of

malevolence in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Jack is a research analyst of the China

program at FD. Jack, what was Volt Typhoon 24 identified by the FBI? What was it? What was its mission? What did it do?

Good evening to you. Thank you for having me. Voltaifoon is one of several recent Chinese

cyber campaigns against the United States. There were several others, assault typhoon, which

targeted telecommunications, and Flax Typhoon, which targeted telecommunications, and Flax

Typhoon, which targeted computer systems connecting the mainland United States to Taiwan.

Vault Typhoon, however, was perhaps the most concerning.

I think it's best described perhaps as akin to strapping dynamite or C4 explosives around

U.S. critical infrastructure.

This was a intensely targeted cyber campaign run by the CCP that aimed at exploiting vulnerabilities within U.S. critical

infrastructure. So these include everything from water systems, telecommunications infrastructure,

electricity grids. And the reason for exploiting these things

is not simply for intellectual property theft or espionage as previous Chinese cyber campaigns

were designed to do, but rather to identify vulnerabilities for potential sabotage in U.S.

critical infrastructure.

Now, if we were talking about kinetic warfare, I would say that this operation was in the

hands of the targeteers picking out likely weaknesses. Is that appropriate for cyber crime

targeteers?

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