Christopher Wray, who's served as FBI director since 2017, is set to step down before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 21, 2025. (FBI)
China’s cyber program has already infiltrated critical American infrastructure and is poised to “wreak havoc” at a whim, the outgoing FBI director told “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
Christopher Wray, who plans to resign as President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month, described the Chinese government as “the greatest-long-term threat” and the “defining threat of our generation,” due in part to its massive, state-funded cyber program.
During the interview with CBS’s Scott Pelley, Wray said Beijing can leverage those programs to target water treatment plants, the electrical grid, natural gas pipelines, telecommunications and other systems.
China has already pre-positioned malware to “lie in wait on those networks,” where it can “inflict real-world harm at a time and place of their choosing,” he told “60 Minutes.”
The FBI also believes that Beijing has already listened in on communications by high-level officials.
Wray didn’t confirm whom he suspects China has surveilled, but “60 Minutes” said it independently confirmed Beijing spied on communications from Donald Trump, Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and U.S. national security figures, according to the televised interview.
The program did not disclose how it confirmed those statements.
China has been accused of multiple state-sponsored hacking campaigns aimed at the United States and other countries, but it routinely denies involvement. (Pixabay)
China is the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment released Feb. 5.
“If Beijing believed that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it would consider aggressive cyber operations against U.S. critical infrastructure and military assets,” the report said.
A cyber strike of that scale would aim to impede the deployment of U.S. troops, induce societal panic and otherwise interfere with U.S. military actions, according to the report.
China over the past decade has been accused of multiple state-sponsored hacking campaigns aimed at the U.S. — as well as European and Asian countries — but it routinely denies involvement.
The U.S. Treasury on Jan. 3 sanctioned Integrity Technology Group Inc., a Beijing-based cybersecurity company, for its alleged involvement in multiple hacking attempts against the U.S.
The hacks were connected to Flax Typhoon, which the Treasury described as “a Chinese malicious state-sponsored cyber group that has been active since at least 2021, often targeting organizations within U.S. critical infrastructure sectors,” according to the Treasury news release announcing the sanctions.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiakun Guo at a Jan. 6 news conference denied any involvement and said Beijing firmly opposes hacking.
“We urge the U.S. to stop using the issue of cybersecurity to vilify and smear China. For quite some time, the US has been trumpeting so-called ‘Chinese hacking’ and even using it to impose illegal and unilateral sanctions on China,” he said, according to a transcript of the news conference.
