Coming Soon - To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy

I think it's the greatest transfer of wealth in history. So they call it advanced persistent threat.
They didn't take by file, they just took the whole directory. Over the past two decades, the greatest heist in history has played out on American soil, or rather, in America's digital realm.
I used to call it the tank through the cornfield. You know, it was just mowing down files and taking as much as they could.
But this wasn't the Robert Redford, George Clooney crowd, or even anonymous 20-somethings cloaked in hoodies. The burglar behind this heist was bigger than you'd ever think.
There are two kinds of big companies in the United States, those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't yet know they've been hacked by the Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party has been behind some of the 21st century's most attention-grabbing breaches.
They've targeted our news sources, The New York Times reporting on a cyber attack on its own computers, our tech giants, Google traced the sabotage back to China, and our most treasured trade secrets. They're targeting research on everything from military equipment to wind turbines to rice and corn seeds.
China's state-sponsored hackers have stolen trillions of dollars worth of research and development. And now their focus has shifted.
They said publicly that the reason for these hacks was in order to disable our critical infrastructure. You don't hack infrastructure for fun.
It's reconnaissance. China has built and exported a surveillance state made off with countless blueprints and now infiltrated our most critical infrastructure.
For anyone watching, this wasn't a surprise. It was a decades-long strategy.
Russia is much like a hurricane. They're aggressive and come at us hard and fast, but China is climate change.
China's multi-pronged assault on our national and economic security make it the defining threat of our generation. I'm Nicole Perlroth.
I spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity reporter at the New York Times. The stories I covered day in and day out of digital espionage and sabotage were stories vital to our national and economic security, and they've flown under the radar for far too long.
But if you think these issues are just an intelligence issue or a government problem

or a nuisance largely just for big corporations who can largely take care of themselves, you could

not be more wrong. It's the people of the United States who are the victims.
Listen to To Catch a

Thief, China's rise to cyber supremacy, wherever you get your podcasts.