• China Speeding Up Plans to Overtake U.S. on World Stage, Says U.S. Commander

    The inability of the United States to adequately push back against China’s growing military might is spurring Beijing to accelerate its plans to remake the current international order in its image, a top U.S. military commander told lawmakers Tuesday.

  • The Microsoft Exchange Hack and the Great Email Robbery

    The world is probably days away from the “Great Email Robbery,” in which a large number of threat actors around the globe are going to pillage and ransom the email servers of tens of thousands of businesses and local governments, Nicholas Weaver writes. Or at least pillage those that the purported Chinese actors haven’t already pillaged.” And now the Biden administration has a real hard policy problem: What now? The SolarWinds hack may have been significant, but [the Exchange attack] will affect far more institutions,” Weaver writes. “The Exchange attack showed complete disregard for possible consequences on behalf of those responsible for the breach,” but “without consequences, such broad attacks will simply continue.”

  • U.S. Accuses Russia of Spreading Disinformation About Western COVID Vaccines

    The United States has accused Russian intelligence agencies of spreading disinformation about Western vaccines against the coronavirus in an attempt to undermine global confidence in their safety. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, told the Wall Street Journal that four websites it claims are associated with Russian intelligence have been publishing articles questioning the efficacy of the vaccines and raising questions about their side effects.

  • Cyber Threat Looms Large over German Election

    Whether hacking attacks or disinformation campaigns, online meddling could sway public opinion and influence the outcome of the September vote, experts warn. Recent incidents suggest that the threat is real.

  • Was SolarWinds a Different Type of Cyber Espionage?

    The Biden administration announced that it will impose sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to the SolarWinds incident. The cybersecurity firm FireEye disclosed the compromise of numerous government and private-sector networks in December 2020. SolarWinds is among the top cybersecurity breaches the U.S. government has ever confronted and has raised critical questions about the integrity of federal networks and Russia’s ultimate intentions. “Given the incident’s significance, it is understandable that the Biden administration is grappling with how to appropriately address it,” Erica D. Borghard writes. But setting aside important limitations of economic sanctions as a policy tool to address malign cyber behavior, “there is a gap between how administration officials are framing the nature of the SolarWinds incident and what the available evidence indicates about it,” she adds.

  • Book Review: Hidden Hand – Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

    Hidden Handis right to remind people that: China and the CCP are not one and the same; China has a party-state system of government that is authoritarian and not democratic; China does not have Western-style rule of law; it does not recognize universal human rights in the way we understand them. What is missing is a balanced discussion of the central debate about the appropriate approach to be taken in the West’s relations with China.

  • China’s Military Tech Ambitions – What’s the U.S.- EU Gameplan?

    A key test of the Biden era of transatlantic relations will be the issue of how the United States and the European Union respond to China’s aggressive efforts to seize market share and industrial knowledge in areas of technology that are critical to national security. Kathleen Doherty writes that the Europeans are divided and have been reluctant to rein in Chinese technological capabilities and ambitions. “The United States and the European Union (EU) have no time to waste in finding a common (or at least complementary) approach.”

  • Economics, National Security, and the Competition with China

    The world has faced the financial crisis and the coronavirus epidemic, but now, George Magnus, writes, it has been presented with a third existential shock that is the defining drama of these early decades of the 21st century: a more truculent and assertive China. China, once viewed by liberal-leaning democracies simply as a formidable consumer and feisty competitor, has also grown and changed over the last decade to become an economic and national security adversary with which the United States has locked horns in ideological and strategic competition.

  • U.S. Concludes Russian Agents Poisoned Navalny, Will Join EU Sanctions

    Senior U.S. administration officials say Washington has concluded that Russian agents used a nerve agent to poison opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. The officials said the United States will mirror EU sanctions on seven senior Russian government officials.

  • SolarWinds Hack Bigger, More Dangerous than Previously Thought, Tech Execs Warn

    Executives with technology companies impacted by the massive cybersecurity breach known as the SolarWinds hack are giving U.S. lawmakers more reason to worry, warning the intrusion is both bigger and more dangerous than first realized.

  • The Biden Administration Should Review and Rebuild the Trump Administration’s China Initiative from the Ground Up

    In mid-January an MIT engineering professor Gang Chen was arrested as part of the Trump administration’s China Initiative, which was launched in November 2018 as a prosecutorial response to China’s persistent, pervasive, and well-documented campaign of economic espionage and illicit knowledge transfer. The Chen case demonstrates why the initiative’s overly broad focus on China has been met with relentless criticism from academic institutions and Asian American advocacy groups.

  • U.S. Government to Stop Buying Chinese-Made Drones

    In its latest move to address national security threats posed by Chinese-made drones, the U.S. federal government’s purchasing agency no longer will purchase drones from Chinese manufacturers. China currently dominates the drone-manufacturing market. One Chinese company, DJI, which is the world’s largest drone maker, has a 76.8 percent share of the U.S. market.

  • Chinese Presence in U.S. Academic Institutions

    When talking about the intensifying U.S.-China competition, most people think of trade battles, tariffs, human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, the militarization of the South China Sea, China’s growing nuclear arsenal, and similar issues. In many ways, however, U.S. universities and research institutions are a more immediate battleground for the U.S.-China rivalry.

  • French Companies Targeted by Russian Cyberattack between 2017 and 2020

    A broad Russian cyberattacks in France was carried out via French software Centreon, which serves large companies and government agencies. The cyberattack resembles Russia’s exploitation of vulnerabilities in SolarWinds to attacks American companies and government agencies. The scope of Russia’s cyberattack in France is still uncertain.

  • The U.S.’s China Strategy Needs New Tools

    Chinese state capitalism caught U.S. policymakers flat-footed. While far from perfect, the “China model” is dramatically reshaping global industry through the concentrated power of economic tools like subsidies, market protection, forced technology transfer and economic espionage. .” Jordan Schneider and David Talbot write that “the toolbox they inherited from the Trump administration is a few drill bits short.” The fact is, “Trump’s China trade strategy failed,” and “Trump’s tariffs also didn’t achieve their domestic objectives.” The U.S. needs to implement a multifaceted strategy to combat Chinese coercion,” Schneider and Talbot write, highlighting the essential components of this new strategy.