Is This the Year of Volt Typhoon?
Commentary
At a recent testimony in front of Congress on Jan. 31, both Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly gave stark accounts of Chinese preplacement of malware on critical infrastructure.
Some called it a “digital Pearl Harbor” scenario. This is not new; Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Service Branch, used this expression in 2012.
This testimony by Mr. Wray and Ms. Easterly was sobering. Ms. Easterly characterized the Chinese actions starkly, “This is truly an ‘Everything Everywhere, All at Once’ scenario.”
In military operations, the term for these kinds of actions before a conflict is known as “Operational Preparation of the Battlefield,” or sometimes it is shortened to “Advance Force Operations.”
The tip of the spear for such actions by the Chinese Communist Party is the mundane-sounding “Strategic Support Force” (SSF),
