Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) sought answers from Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Brent Sadler in a recent House Oversight national security hearing on holding China accountable for recent cyberattacks.
Rep. Biggs began by condemning the Biden Administration's foreign policy, saying the "weakness on the world stage emboldened our geopolitical rivals. China and Russia continuously attack US critical infrastructure with few consequences."
Consequently, Rep. Biggs asked Sadler what the Trump Administration could do to hold China and Russia accountable for such attacks.
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Sadler replied, "This is the challenge of this new Cold War that we are in," adding that "we have to be willing to use all tools that are available to us for an end state, a strategic end."
Moreover, he suggested that the United States "operated in cylinders of excellence," meaning American economic power, military power, and diplomacy work well but independently of one another, and "We need to bring that together and bring all those forces to bear."
"We are moving out of a gray zone, a comfortable gray zone. We have gotten too comfortable in the last 20 years into a more real and conventional kind of confrontation. So we have to be ready for these types of incidents."
The Arizona Congressman then asked for specific means of countering China-backed cyberattacks, such as the hacks carried out by Volt Typhoon and similar groups.
"The cybersecurity attacks are so thoroughly embedded in telecom infrastructure that federal law enforcement agencies urged Americans to use communication methods with end-to-end encryption despite years of efforts by these same agencies to mandate similar backdoors and end-to-end encrypted communication apps," Biggs continued, asking Sadler how the Trump Administration could thwart future cyberattacks.
Sadler suggested offensive capabilities, "where you have to put more cost and accountability on those that are launching these attacks. That is always going to remain behind the veil of secrecy, but continuing to resource and continue to sharpen those tools, which in many cases may take months, if not years, to get the placement necessary so that when an actor like the Chinese Communist Party does do another attack against us, the United States and citizens, that we are able to levy a cost on them."
In late January, Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) sought accountability from US officials for failing to prevent the same cyberattacks. He said his constituents often ask him "why nobody in the federal government [is] ever held accountable for their failures."
