The new front in China’s cyber campaign against America

THE ISLAND of Guam, a tiny American territory that lies more than 6,000km west of Hawaii, has long known that it would take a battering in any Sino-American war. The island’s expanding airfields and ports serve as springboards for American ships, subs and bombers. In the opening hours of a conflict, these would be subject to wave after wave of Chinese missiles. But an advance party of attackers seems to have lurked quietly within Guam’s infrastructure for years. In mid-2021 a Chinese hacking group—later dubbed Volt Typhoon—burrowed deep inside the island’s communication systems. The intrusions had no obvious utility for espionage. They were intended, as America’s government would later conclude, for “disruptive or destructive cyber-attacks against…critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict”. Sabotage, in short.