NEW HAVEN, Connecticut: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray recently upped the ante in America’s anti-China campaign. In congressional testimony on January 31, he sounded the alarm over intensified Chinese hacking activity and warned that US infrastructure — telecommunications, energy, transportation and water — is acutely vulnerable to the Chinese state-sponsored hacker group Volt Typhoon. Front-page coverage by the New York Times (NYT) added to the sense of urgency.

A few days after Wray’s testimony, a joint report from the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) provided detailed documentation of the Volt Typhoon threat. More front-page coverage by the NYT duly followed. And then came the outage of a major cellular network on February 22. Suddenly, cyber fears have taken on a life of their own.