How China’s Volt Typhoon hackers target US infrastructure

The US government and its primary global intelligence partners, known as the Five Eyes, issued a warning on March 19, 2024, about the activity targeting critical infrastructure by Volt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored hacker group.

The warning echoes analyses by the cybersecurity community about Chinese state-sponsored hacking in recent years. As with many cyberattacks and attackers, Volt Typhoon has many aliases and is also known as Vanguard Panda, Bronze Silhouette, Dev-0391, UNC3236, Voltzite and Insidious Taurus.

Following these latest warnings, China again denied that it engages in offensive cyberespionage.

Volt Typhoon has compromised thousands of devices around the world since it was publicly identified by security analysts at Microsoft in May 2023. However, some analysts in both the government and cybersecurity community believe the group has been targeting infrastructure since mid-2021, and possibly much longer.

Volt Typhoon uses malicious software that penetrates internet-connected systems by exploiting vulnerabilities such as weak administrator passwords, factory default logins and devices that haven’t been updated regularly. The hackers have targeted communications, energy, transportation, water and wastewater systems in the US and its territories, such as Guam.

In many ways, Volt Typhoon functions similarly to traditional botnet operators that have plagued the internet for decades. It takes control of vulnerable internet devices such as routers and security cameras to hide and establish a beachhead in advance of using that system to launch future attacks.

Operating this way makes it difficult for cybersecurity defenders to accurately identify the source of an attack. Worse, defenders could accidentally