The Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, revealed that the U.S. Navy’s infrastructure had been infiltrated by China, CNBC reports. The Chinese espionage was conducted through cyberattacks which compromised secret communication channels. Both the NSA and Microsoft went public with the attack.
The vulnerability in Navy communications goes beyond military infrastructure and could have repercussions in the civilian economy, as happened in 2021 with the SolarWinds Russian hack. The Chinese hackers exploited a vulnerability in a cybersecurity tool, which itself is used to underpin a significant range of digital infrastructure in a wide range of industries.
The U.S. Navy remains China’s predominant enemy, as it has repeatedly protected Taiwan from Communist invasion all the way back to the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. Any hope for Taiwan to defeat a Chinese invasion would rest on open sea lanes to resupply from the United States, as well as securing American and Allied reinforcements. Guam is a critical node of naval logistics in the Pacific, which makes it particularly vulnerable to Chinese surveillance and potentially sabotage.
