After researchers revealed a Chinese hacking gang had been snooping on such networks, the U.S. State Department issued a warning on Thursday that China was capable of launching cyber assaults against essential infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and rail systems.

The Chinese cyber-espionage campaign was directed at American military and government targets, according to a multi-nation notice released on Wednesday.

Assertions that China’s spies are targeting Western targets have been refuted by the Chinese government, which referred to the warning from the United States and its allies as a “collective disinformation campaign.”

According to American officials, they are still trying to understand the threat.

“We’ve had at least one location that we didn’t know about since the hunt guide was released come forward with data and information,” Rob Joyce, the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) cybersecurity director, told Reuters. The agency disclosed technical details earlier to help critical service providers detect the spying.

In a second statement, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stated that it was attempting to comprehend “the breadth of potential intrusions and associated impacts.”

According to CISA’s executive assistant director, Eric Goldstein, this would enable it to “provide assistance when necessary and more effectively understand the tactics used by this adversary.”

According to scholars and officials, the fact that this espionage action is more stealthy than typical spy operations presents a challenge in protecting against it.

“In these cases the adversary is often using legitimate credentials and legitimate network administration tools to gain access to execute their objectives on a target network,” Goldstein said. “Many traditional methods of detection, such as antivirus, will not find these intrusions.”

Microsoft experts who discovered the effort, which they called Volt Typhoon, warned that it “could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises”—a reference to the rising tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan and other matters.

“The U.S. intelligence community assesses that China almost certainly is capable of launching cyberattacks that could disrupt critical infrastructure services within the United States, including against oil and gas pipelines and rail systems,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a press briefing.

“It’s vital for government and network defenders in the public to stay vigilant.”

After the 2021 hack of the crucial Colonial Pipeline interrupted over half of the fuel supply on the U.S. East Coast, U.S. agencies have been advocating for stronger cybersecurity practises in the country’s majority-privately held vital infrastructure sector.

The Volt Typhoon was the subject of an alert Wednesday from the intelligence services of the United States, the United Kingdom, and their close allies. Using the FortiGuard devices from the security company Fortinet, Microsoft said that the group had targeted vital infrastructure companies in the American territory of Guam.

According to researcher Marc Burnard, whose company Secureworks has dealt with several intrusions connected to Volt Typhoon, Secureworks has not observed any evidence of destructive activity by Volt Typhoon’s hackers, but rather that they were focused on stealing data that would “shed light on U.S. military activities.”

Volt Typhoon was undoubtedly positioning itself to launch disruptive strikes, according to NSA’s Joyce.

“It’s clear that some of the entities on here are of no intelligence value,” he told Reuters of the critical infrastructure sites identified by the government.

The signals sent out by the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were meant to promote their intelligence collaboration, known as the Five Eyes, and Washington was responsible for hacking, according to Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry.

“The United States is the empire of hacking,” Mao said.

(Adapted from AlJazeera.com)

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