>>21706000 pb

>ALERT Tiktok banning and DELETING accounts that post about North Carolina and Lithium!

> They are censoring vital information and deleting accounts so the main source of info comes form the MSM which is mostly loes.

The timing on this headline….

Sep 20, 2024 -

Technology

Chinese hacking "typhoons" threaten U.S. infrastructure

Sam Sabin

The Chinese government is running another broad campaign to hack as many American organizations as possible — heightening the threat across critical infrastructure.

Why it matters: The new hacking campaign suggests China could hold more expansive power to turn off key U.S. infrastructure than previously thought.

Driving the news: FBI director Christopher Wray said at the Aspen Cyber Summit on Wednesday that the bureau and its partners hijacked thousands of devices last week that a Chinese hacking group had infected with malware.

Flax Typhoon, a new China-backed hacking team, infected home routers, firewalls, storage devices, and Internet of Things devices like cameras and video recorders.

Zoom in: As of June, Flax Typhoon's botnet included more than 260,000 malware-infected devices across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia, according to a U.S. government advisory.

Half of the hijacked devices were located in the U.S., Wray said in his remarks.

Security researchers at Black Lotus Labs said in a coinciding report that hackers have used the botnet to target U.S. and Taiwanese organizations in the military, government, higher education, telecommunications, defense and IT sectors.

The FBI also alleged that the Flax Typhoon hackers worked for Integrity Technology Group, a Chinese tech company that does contract work for Beijing's intelligence agencies.

The FBI also said that Integrity Technology Group operated and controlled the botnet.

Threat level: A senior administration official told reporters that while Flax Typhoon is focused solely on espionage, its more destructive counterpart, Volt Typhoon, shared some of the infrastructure for its attacks.

The big picture: The threat of China lurking inside U.S. and other global networks is now existential for American companies and government agencies, Tom Fanning, former executive chairman at electric power operator Southern Company, told Axios.

"While Flax Typhoon is the latest manifestation of a nation-state attacking the private sector, we do know that these things happen all the time," Fanning said.

Officials worry that China is establishing these footholds in networks tied to the U.S. and its allies so it can cause societal panic and trade disruptions during a potential Taiwan invasion.

Flashback: Earlier this year the country's top cybersecurity officials warned Congress about Volt Typhoon and shared that they had taken down that hacking group's own network of infected devices.

Volt Typhoon, a hacking group first publicly unveiled in May 2023, has gained access to several major critical infrastructure organizations, including a West Coast port, a utility in Hawaii, and at least one oil and gas pipeline.

Similar to Flax Typhoon, this group also targeted routers to gain initial access to these systems.

Yes, but: Botnet takedowns aren't a foolproof fix for taking down hackers, especially nation-state actors.

Despite a successful botnet takedown in January, Volt Typhoon has remained a persistent threat to critical infrastructure, officials have warned.

Cybercriminal gangs have quickly found workarounds after the government seized their botnets.

Between the lines: Operations like the one targeting Flax Typhoon still make it "riskier, costlier and harder" for nation-states to spy and hack U.S. critical infrastructure, Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging tech, told reporters.

What we're watching: Wray warned that the Flax Typhoon operation is just "one round in a much longer fight."

Stopping future threats will require the private sector and government to strengthen collaboration to get "as much of a real-time view of what's happening as possible," Fanning added.

Go deeper: What to know about China's cyber threats

> https://www.axios.com/2024/09/20/china-critical-infrastructure-cyberattacks

>>21706632

5 Chinese nationals charged with covering up midnight visit to Michigan military site

By Associated Press

3 minute read

Published 6:27 PM EDT, Wed October 2, 2024

FILE - This photo shows an aerial view of Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center in Grayling, Mich., July 19, 2014. (AP Photo/John L. Russell, File)

John L. Russell/AP

Detroit AP —

US authorities charged five Chinese nationals with lying and trying to cover their tracks, more than a year after they were confronted in the dark near a remote Michigan military site where thousands of people had gathered for summer drills.

The five, who were University of Michigan students at the time, were not charged for what happened at Camp Grayling in August 2023. Rather they are accused of misleading investigators about the trip and conspiring to clear their phones of photos, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.

The FBI noted in the Tuesday court filing that there have been instances of college students from China taking photos of vital defense sites in the United States.

There was nothing in the file revealing the whereabouts of the five men.

“The defendants are not in custody. Should they come into contact with U.S. authorities, they will be arrested and face these charges,” Gina Balaya, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit, said Wednesday.

In summer 2023, the five were confronted after midnight near a lake by a sergeant major with the Utah National Guard. One said, “We are media,” before they collected their belongings and agreed to leave the area, the FBI said.

The FBI learned that the men had booked a room at a nearby motel a week before they were spotted outside Camp Grayling, 200 miles north of Detroit.

Four months later, one of the men was interviewed by border officers at the Detroit airport before traveling to South Korea and China. He told investigators that he and others had taken a trip to northern Michigan “to see shooting stars,” the FBI said.

A check of his external hard drive revealed two images of military vehicles taken on the same night of the encounter with the National Guard officer, the FBI said.

The other four men were interviewed last March after arriving in Chicago on a flight from Iceland. They acknowledged being in northern Michigan in August 2023, but they said it was to see a meteor shower, the FBI said.

They mentioned the National Guard officer but referred to him only as “the soldier,” a camper or “nice guy,” according to the criminal complaint.

The men last December communicated on WeChat about clearing photos from their cameras and phones, investigators said.

The FBI said all five men graduated last spring from the University of Michigan. They were part of a joint program between the university and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China.

In 2020, two Chinese nationals who were pursuing master’s degrees at the University of Michigan were sentenced to prison for illegally photographing sites at a naval air station in Key West, Florida.

>>21706632

>Sep 20, 2024 -

>Technology

>Chinese hacking "typhoons" threaten U.S. infrastructure

>>21706692

>5 Chinese nationals charged with covering up midnight visit to Michigan military site

>By Associated Press

>3 minute read

>Published 6:27 PM EDT, Wed October 2, 2024

Is China Sneaking Military Personnel into the U.S. Via Border? What We Know

Published Jun 16, 2023 at 12:28 PM EDT

Updated Jun 19, 2023 at 3:03 AM EDT

By Aleks Phillips

U.S. News Reporter

206

The Republican Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee has said that it was "very likely" that "military personnel" were being inserted into the United States by China by crossing the southern land border.

Announcing an investigation into the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, over his role in the border crisis, Mark Green, a former U.S. Army serviceman and representative for Tennessee, claimed many of the Chinese nationals entering America were "military-age men," many of them having "known ties" to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People's Liberation Army (PLA).

It comes after Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, told the House Armed Services Committee in March that China, along with Russia, was now posing "more dangerous challenges to the safety and security of the U.S. homeland."

Both Dalton and Green cited the incident in February in which a Chinese spy balloon—which Beijing claims was a wayward weather balloon—passedover the continental U.S. before being shot down and recovered off the coast of South Carolina as a sign of this new threat.

During a press conference, Green noted that there had been "a massive surge in Chinese nationals" crossing the southern border, claiming "many of whom are military-age men, many with known ties to the PLA, ties to the CCP."

Public data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency shows 2023 has seen a spike in encounters of Chinese nationals at the southern land border compared to the previous years—when border crossings were overall lower due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions.

As of April, there had been a total of 9,854 encounters in the fiscal year-to-date, which runs from October to September, rising sharply from February. In 2022, there were 2,176 encounters.

While over 1,500 of these were individuals in a family unit, the vast majority (8,304) were single adults—though a breakdown of age and what proportion are male is not given. Neither has the government publicly stated if any were believed to have ties to Beijing.

Asked about the credibility of Green's claim, Rebecca Grant Ph.D., a national security analyst at IRIS Independent Research, told Newsweek that she personally believed it to be true, referencing the likelihood of some immigrants having ties to the Chinese state given the many Chinese nationals already in the U.S.—5.4 million in 2021, according to Migration Policy Institute figures.

"If you're a bad guy that wants to infiltrate operatives into the U.S.A., the southern border is a pretty easy way to do it," she added.

A Department of Homeland Security official told Newsweek that it used "biometric and biographical" information on those encountered at the border "to identify potential terrorists or criminals and prevent their release into the United States."

They stressed that "anyone who poses a national security or public safety threat is detained and not released into the United States."

When questioned on his source for the claims, Green said that he had heard it from a border sector chief, but declined to say more. However, he added: "We have a classified briefing on it in the very near future."

Newsweek approached CBP for comment regarding Green's claims via email on Friday.

Grant said that it was an area of national security where the intelligence community was "never going to give us public information," but "the fact that they're going to brief Congress on it tells me that there's something there."

Green also said that the alleged insertions were "very likely using Russia's template of sending military personnel into Ukraine," adding: "China is doing the same in the United States."

In March, a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank found that Moscow had embedded a "large agent network" within Ukraine prior to its invasion of the nation in 2022, in the midst of a destabilizing battle with Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region.

Grant said that those in the U.S. national intelligence industry "have not heard of a Chinese infiltration tactic like that," but argued that the opportunity presented by the southern border of entering the country illegally had also not been so exploited before.