Dean Cheng
The 2024 revelations over China’s effort to implant malware in critical U.S. infrastructure by the Volt Typhoon hacking group — as well as the Salt Typhoon group’s successful breaching of at least nine major U.S. telecoms — have renewed concern over Beijing’s constant, ongoing efforts to hack Western companies, governments and non-governmental organizations. Unlike past incidents, like those involving Chinese military unit 61398, which were largely about cyber espionage, the Volt Typhoon group was actively implanting malware designed to disrupt critical infrastructure such as water and power systems.
As the Volt Typhoon group is believed to be a state actor (as opposed to a criminal group or “hacktivists”), its actions highlight that the Chinese government is not just gathering information but instead threatening to sabotage the ability of economies and states to function.
Just as the Ukraine-Russia war is demonstrating that drone warfare has moved from the tactical to the strategic, China’s hacking activities showcase how cyber intrusions are increasingly strategic in effect. This is especially true when considering their potential impact on space
Military history demonstrates that the ability to achieve surprise can be decisive; a smaller force exploiting surprise can often defeat a larger one. At its most basic, surprise allows one to concentrate forces at the time and place of one’s choosing. Further, organizational, doctrinal and technological surprise can exploit changes that an adversary cannot compensate or prepare for.
While tactical surprise has marked warfare for millennia, strategic surprise is much harder. Mobilizing and moving vast armies with minimal prospect of detection came about only in the 19th and 20th centuries, as railroads, motorization and then airpower allowed forces to concentrate rapidly and reach farther, even bypassing an adversary’s defenses.
Moreover, while various nations have succeeded in achieving strategic surprise at the onset of a conflict — like Japan at Pearl Harbor, Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War or Iraq at the outset of the Iran-Iraq war — capitalizing on that surprise can be difficult. Industrial states have enormous resources, and given time, can mobilize them, as the United States and Soviet Union did in World War II.
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