US' fabricated cyber threats only strain ties: China Daily editorial

In their latest scaremongering about China, China hawks in the United States have once again been voicing allegations of Chinese hacking.

While they no doubt like to believe they are like apex avian predators swooping on their prey, with their abrasive cawing of yet another spurious China threat, they appear more like a conspiracy of ravens rather than a boil of taloned raptors. This time, by rasping harsh accusations of "Chinese hackers" having conducted massive cyberattacks on US telecommunications companies and infrastructure, they are behaving just like a noisy unkindness of ravens affronted by change. Anything unfamiliar to ravens or a shift in the hierarchy of the group will be met with stress responses, such as noisy over-preening by individuals, something that has become prevalent in Washington's anti-China circle. These rasping Washington ravens are practitioners of the notoriously false notion that "a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth" when it comes to spreading erroneous and biased information about China.

Despite it being universally known that the United States is the world's largest hacking empire, taking advantage of its strength in technologies to conduct prolonged theft and surveillance of other governments and even its own citizens, some politicians in the US with a prejudiced view of China defy reality by pointing an accusing finger at Beijing as the biggest cybersecurity threat to the US.

"Chinese hackers" compromised even more US telecoms than previously known, including Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications and Windstream, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Saturday, citing "people familiar with the matter". One day earlier, the US Treasury Department said in an announcement that "Chinese malicious cyber actors" were responsible for the "recent targeting of the Treasury's own IT infrastructure".

Moreover, as if to justify the claim of China posing a serious threat to US national security in cyberspace, the US on Friday sanctioned a Chinese company, Integrity Technology Group, accusing it of being behind a prolific hacking group known as "Flax Typhoon". The US State Department claims that the company is a large Chinese government contractor with ties to the Ministry of State Security and that its hackers are working at the direction of Beijing to target critical infrastructure in the US and overseas.

These imagined Chinese keyboard warriors are depicted as an all powerful, destructive force with astonishing skill level and ability to "shut down dozens of US ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will", as US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was quoted by the newspaper as telling telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting in the fall of 2023.

Washington's narrative duplicitously portrays Beijing as the wicked mastermind wielding state-of-the-art cyber capabilities to orchestrate espionage, malign influence and attack operations against the US and its allies in an Oscar-deserving role-reversal that exonerates Washington of all culpability for such actions that it has been repeatedly shown to be the primary perpetrator of.

For Washington, such pot-kettle-black claims are the means by which it legitimizes the US conducting more "offensive cyber operations" to maintain its supremacy in cyberspace, and justify more inputs in preparation for future cyber warfare against its so-called adversaries.

China has consistently opposed all forms of hacking activities, and the US resorting to dissemination of false information targeting China for political purposes will not change the fact that it is the US that is the world's largest source of cyberattacks and that it poses the biggest threat to cybersecurity globally.

According to an investigation report released in April last year by China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and other technical teams, US government-backed hacking organizations waged over 45 million cyberattacks against Chinese government entities, academies, scientific research institutes, enterprises and critical infrastructure from May 2023 to January 2024. Such attacks were authorized by Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a domestic law that allows the US government to continue collecting communications of non-Americans located outside the country without a warrant, according to the findings. That poses serious threats not only to Americans, but also to countries around the world in terms of state sovereignty and individual privacy.

Those in the US fabricating groundless allegations about China conducting cyberattacks against the US and its allies are squawking to the wind and their shenanigans only attract an audience willing to believe the Earth is flat. Their antics will do nothing but only further strain China-US relations.