Chinese hackers infiltrated plane, train and water systems for five years, US says

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 95 points – Chinese hackers infiltrated plane, train and water systems for five years, US says
theguardian.com

Chinese hackers infiltrated plane, train and water systems for five years, US says::A group known as Volt Typhoon, geared toward sabotage, quietly burrowed into the networks of critical US infrastructure

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Could we not tie critical infrastructure to the open web? I know it’s great to have these systems communicating with each other, but damn…hire some extra humans to throw the important switches and push the right buttons air gapped from the web so that some malicious actor can’t cause massive damage from halfway around the world via a few lines of code.

You mean create jobs - what kind of nutball idea is that? I won't stand for it - that's not how I want my our tax money to be spent! I will burn this place to the ground before I let that happen.

- Republicans, all across the entire nation

Let’s underfund critical security to stoke xenophobia to stri up more nationalism and feed the MIC even more money. Oh, and don’t forget to buy a personal arsenal for Doomsday!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

An advanced group of Chinese hackers taking aim at critical US infrastructure has been active for as long as half a decade, American and allied intelligence agencies said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

The US National Security Agency, US cyber watchdog CISA, the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration said that the group known as Volt Typhoon had quietly burrowed into the networks of aviation, rail, mass transit, highway, maritime, pipeline, water and sewage organizations.

None of the organizations were identified by name, but the statement said that US intelligence officials had observed the hackers “maintaining access and footholds within some victim IT environments for at least five years”.

The statement, which was co-signed by the respective cybersecurity agencies of Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, is the latest in a series of warnings from US officials about Volt Typhoon, a group that has drawn particular alarm because it appears geared toward sabotage rather than espionage.

The widespread nature of the hacks has led to a series of meetings between the White House and the private technology industry, including several telecommunications and cloud commuting companies, in which the US government asked for assistance in tracking the activity.

“We are extraordinarily concerned about malicious cyber activity from the PRC state-sponsored actor that industry calls Volt Typhoon,” a senior CISA official, Eric Goldstein, referring to the People’s Republic of China, told Reuters ahead of the statement’s release.

The original article contains 248 words, the summary contains 236 words. Saved 5%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!