A senior FBI official warned U.S. officials that Chinese hackers are posing a greater threat to U.S. infrastructure.
Cynthia Kaiser, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, talked with secretaries of state from across the United States. She alerted them to the increased threat, CNN reported.
While not giving many new specifics, Kaiser seemed to hint that election infrastructure was particularly vulnerable. Democratic and Republican information technology systems were scanned in the weeks ahead of the 2022 midterm elections in what the FBI fears could have been reconnaissance for future operations.
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State-backed Chinese hackers are only one part of “a sea of things we’re concerned” about, Kaiser told the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Washington, D.C.
She said last year’s attack shows that “we could see more significant Chinese cyber activity against your states in the coming year.”
Another concern is Russian hackers, but Kaiser noted that there haven’t been indications of any escalation in the threat they have always posed.
“We don’t have any intelligence that Russia is looking to target state and local or election systems more directly than before,” she added. “But we’re certainly aware of … the possibility and have a very low threshold for sharing that information.”
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The FBI claims China has the largest state-sanctioned hacking program in the world, surpassing those of the rest of the world combined. Concerns over Chinese espionage have escalated amid the downing of several suspected Chinese spy balloons in recent weeks.
