To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
BONUS: Live Panel with Top China & Cyber Experts at The New York Stock Exchange
Thu, 27 Mar 2025
For this special live recording of To Catch a Thief at The New York Stock Exchange, host and former lead cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter for The New York Times, Nicole Perlroth sits down with those who have been directly targeted by, traced, or directly engaged China’s state-sponsored hackers, diplomatically, or in the cyber domain: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Barboza, the National Security Agency’s former Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, Jim Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha. They discuss how the Chinese hacking threat has morphed from corporate espionage to insidious attacks on infrastructure, the strategic leverage China hopes to gain with these hacks, how Xi Jinping views Trump 2.0, and what levers the United States can still pull to salvage what’s left of its cyber defense.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of Chinese cyber espionage today?
Hi, everyone. Well, welcome to a special live episode of To Catch a Thief. And just to set the stage for the people who are not in this room, we are sitting here at the New York Stock Exchange today, surrounded by an audience of CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, these are the people who control the flow of information inside and outside some of our most vibrant American corporations and beyond.
And it's an honor to be here with you today. And before I get to introducing the very special people I have on stage, just a few words about this podcast. Why did we do this on Chinese cyber espionage?
Chapter 2: How has the Chinese cyber threat evolved over the years?
This would have been a project that would have been unheard of 15 years ago, back when McAfee was picking up the pieces of some of the big Chinese cyber espionage campaigns like Night Dragon and Shady Rat. They were not even allowed to say the word China as part of their attribution. It was a very sensitive thing at the time.
Here we are 15 years later, and we have a whole podcast series about Chinese cyber espionage. The reason I felt that it was critical we do this on Chinese cyber espionage is because this is the threat that in some ways I lived and breathed at the New York Times, but it's the threat that has been gnawing at me ever since I left the New York Times.
because I feel that I failed and that media failed and business failed and in some ways government failed to really connect the dots for the people on this particular threat. We never went back to Nortel, for instance, when it went bankrupt. And when they wrote all these bankruptcy stories, no one ever mentioned, well, actually, the company was hacked by China several years ago.
Huawei owns all that IP. They've been subsidizing it, rolling it into global markets, and now Nortel is gone. And we never did that with solar companies. We never did it with turbine makers. We never did it with electric vehicles now. China is now the biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles. It's no longer Tesla as of 2023. We never did it with electric vehicle batteries.
We never did it with home routers. Now it's Chinese companies that own the U.S. home router market, as Rob actually testified to Congress the other day. These are routers that have been used. in attacks on American critical infrastructure. In fact, just today I went on Amazon and looked up a TP-Link home router.
It is Amazon's number one overall pick, and they own something like 60% market share of U.S. home routers. And these home routers have been used to funnel attacks into America's critical infrastructure. It's not a hypothetical threat, it's a real threat. And all of this has been going on kind of right under our noses, but we've never really connected the dots.
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Chapter 3: Who are the key experts discussing Chinese cyber threats?
So really the magic of this episode, of tonight, of where we are, is that sitting next to me are the people who are the dots, and we are about to connect them. On my left here is my former colleague, David Barbosa, who will always be a colleague in my heart. David was the Shanghai bureau chief for the New York Times. He is the reason that we were actually hacked at the New York Times.
His coverage was that good. It earned him a Pulitzer, but it also earned him the wrath of the CCP. And I wrote that story for The New York Times. We actually have our former CTO, Rajiv, in the audience today. So we remember that very well. And I remember when the hack first happened, we thought they were there to maybe shut us down.
But very quickly, it became clear, nope, they were there for David, and more specifically, David's sources. These days, David is the co-founder of The Wire China, which is doing some fantastic data journalism and news journalism, traditional journalism on China. So it's an honor to have you here today. To his left is Rob Joyce. Until very recently, Rob Joyce was head of cybersecurity at NSA.
He served at the agency for something like 34 years, right? and had a very storied career there, including leading the Tailored Access Operations Unit at NSA, which is the agency that conducts hacking on behalf of our foreign intelligence collection program. So he knows better than anyone what the Chinese capabilities are.
To his left is Jem Easterly, who, until very recently, was the director of CISA, the nation's cyber defense agency. And before that, was actually head of global security at Morgan Stanley. And before that, also had a storied career at NSA, which included standing up Cyber Command. And it's an honor to have her here today. To her left was my favorite phone call at The New York Times, Jim Lewis.
I called him every time there was a cybersecurity disaster brewing. Jim, until very recently also, was senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which tells you nothing about Jim. What you need to know about Jim is that Jim has been privy to, partaken in, supported almost every back channel negotiation that the U.S.
has had with China on the cyber threat. And then to his left is Bipol Sinha, the CEO and co-founder of Rubrik, which is leading the charge on cyber resiliency in this country and making sure that our worst day, the day you get hacked, is not your last day. So it's an honor to be here with all of you.
These are the people who have been targeted by Instrumentl in tracking and engaging the Chinese cyber espionage threat. Without further ado, let's get started. I'm going to ask the first question to my friend David here, which I want to address right away the elephant in the room.
And I think the elephant in the room is this, you know, covering this threat at the New York Times and doing a whole podcast series about Chinese cyber espionage. You are walking a very tight rope because this is a very real threat, but you also don't want to stoke the kinds of disgusting xenophobia that we saw during COVID. And it is a tough rope to walk.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges of reporting on Chinese cyber espionage?
These are suspicions about Chinese students. Or my colleague is Chinese. My wife is Chinese. So I do worry a lot about that. I think every story we write, we need to think about not only is it true what we're saying, but what could be the impact of this story? Could it lead to xenophobia in the country?
So I think saying that up front and thinking about that, there are lots of Chinese Americans, Asian Americans in this country. We know what happened during COVID. So I think keeping that top of mind, we're going to say some really tough things about China, but we shouldn't think everyone who's Chinese is a spy, is a hacker, is the threat.
Speaking of the threat, I'm going to toss this one to you, Rob. You have, I think, what is one of the best quotes on how to conceptualize the threat. You just heard it all in the podcast trailer, and it's this. So you said that basically Russia is the hurricane, China is climate change. Tell us what you mean by that.
If you look at the operational way that China comes at us, it is scope and scale and now sophistication. In the early days of China hacking, the US kind of left it off. They weren't very sophisticated. They were easily detected. It was blunt force. And now over time, they continue to come and come and come.
And they have such quantities around their ecosystem that does this hacking, whether it be the military government assets, the intelligence service government assets, and increasingly the commercial assets. assets who support these activities by writing malware, by providing the infrastructure that the governments hack through.
But now they even do independent hacking operations themselves, where they choose the target, they grab the data, and then they offer it back to CCP government officials to see if there's a profit in that space.
So they have grown in scope and scale, sophistication on a level nobody else has seen and is, quite frankly, becoming a huge problem for us because of the critical infrastructure threat, because of the pervasive nature they've gotten into things like our telcos and our ISPs. The way that they're able to operate at scale is just monumental.
Jen, talk to us about what you saw or how you saw this threat morphing at CISA. You know, you oversaw CISA during a period we saw an unrelenting Chinese assault on our federal cloud systems, on our telecommunication networks, and on our critical infrastructure.
Yeah, so great to be here with everybody. I think it's important to understand how serious, urgent, and different the threat that we're talking about has evolved into. You know, as Rob alluded to, for years and years, we really focused on China as a threat of espionage, data theft, intellectual property theft. And over the past few years, we actually saw a threat that was different in kind.
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Chapter 5: Why is China considered a long-term cyber threat?
So in a intent by Chinese doctrine specifically to incite societal panic and chaos across the US and to deter our ability to marshal military might and citizen will. And that was a threat that we started to really get our arms around working with our intelligence community partners, our FBI partners and industry.
And then based on that information, started working with a variety of victims where we would show up, CISA and FBI, let them know that we think that their networks had been penetrated. and then work with them to actually hunt for those actors to attempt to shut down the access points and then to help them harden their infrastructure.
But we had done this across multiple sectors with multiple entities. And I'll tell you the way that I've always talked about this is we believe what we were able to find when we were at CISA was really just the tip of the iceberg. And it's a full range of targets. One actually was just out there publicly for the first time. We obviously don't talk about targets because we protect victims.
But one target actually talked about this publicly. I think it was in the record. It was a very small water and power facility up in Littleton, Massachusetts. I think they serve about 15,000 citizens of Littleton and Boxborough. And they were one of the victims. So think about what China is doing.
They're doing this opportunistically, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for access points in multiple places across multiple sectors across the U.S., again, to be able to get in to cause disruption and or destruction in the event of a conflict in Taiwan.
I think the only real public glimpse that we have of what this threat could look like that you just outlined is colonial pipeline. And we all sort of remember people inexplicably showing up at gas stations with giant plastic bags
to fill up with fuel and one of the things that hit me was there was a doe assessment at the time that found that as a country the united states could have only afforded three or four more days of colonial pipeline being down and it wasn't so much the gas or the jet fuel we had the reserves it was the diesel required to run our factories so three more days and that was one target
I hadn't even heard of Colonial Pipeline until this ransomware attack happened. That was one target by a bumbling group of ransomware criminals. And what Jen is describing is think about a coordinated attack on not Colonial Pipeline, but five or seven Colonial Pipelines, and then add in water and... the grid, et cetera. And when you think about it that way, it's not a hypothetical anymore.
That's what hit me in the course of this podcast project. It's a very real threat based on where we're seeing this targeting. You think about it that way, you think about the psychological impact that that would create for the United States to summon the appetite to go support an island's independence 7,000 miles away.
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Chapter 6: How is the U.S. infrastructure vulnerable to cyber attacks?
And Jim, you've been in, I think, recent negotiations or conversations with the Chinese on would they agree to draw any red lines around certain targets like water? How have those conversations gone?
So I've been negotiating on and off with the Chinese for about 30 years, starting out as a child, I might add. And one thing that's changed, they're much more confident. And I saw this with the Russians. I was at the UN, and the Russian ambassador was talking, and the Chinese ambassador opened the newspaper. I think it was the Post. It's like, I could care less what you have to say.
And they feel that way about us now. All right. And so they feel like they're winning. Why would they do anything different? And on targets, the previous administration had some ideas about perhaps proposing along the lines of what we've been discussing. There's some targets that should be off limits, right?
Now, point of fact, under international law, there are no targets that are off limits if they're not There are no targets that are off limits. You could debate that. But the Chinese basically said, we don't think the way you think. We don't think that you're going to have a set water facilities and you'll take them off the table. We look at it in terms of, what's the consequence if we do this?
We've judged it by consequence. If it's a little consequence, Podunk, Massachusetts or wherever the hell it was. We don't care. Is it something else? So they have a very different way of looking at this and a very different attitude. They're cautious.
They're very cautious, but they feel like they're winning and that seeing them over a couple decades, they've gone from, they started out doing the old, you're the master, we're the student, tell us what to do. To now it's like, you guys are the past. We're here. We're not that cautious anymore. So I think it's a very different ballgame than it was, say, even 10 years ago.
So the answer was no, we're not going to draw any red lines.
Well, I had a specific request to them. Are you willing to engage in a... I don't negotiate for the U.S. government, but I will occasionally ask questions that the U.S. government has asked me to ask. And the answer was no, we're not interested. And part of it was, and some of these are people I've known for a long time, and they had a good point. And it's like, look,
Five years from now, 10 years from now, we're going to be much stronger than you. So why should we make a deal with you now? Because we'll have a better hand to play five years from now.
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Chapter 7: What strategies are being employed to counter cyber threats?
Before I get to Bipple, I want to ask you, Rob, I think there is this idea that we have entered into a new era of mutually assured digital destruction, where we're all holding guns to each other's heads and saying, you better not hit us because we can just shoot right back at you.
And I think you'd have to be a fly on Vladimir Putin's wall to find out why he hasn't done more in the way of attacks on our infrastructure because of our support for Ukraine. Or maybe our defenses were just that good that we were able to deflect them. And I know you can't speak to the U.S.
capabilities, but what do you say about the deterrence of what we think might be this era of mutually assured digital destruction? And what are sort of the misunderstandings maybe about what our capabilities are in China?
Yeah, so the first thing I'd point out, Nicole, is I am a firm believer that cyber doesn't stop cyber, right? You don't get a bigger cyber bat and hit somebody hard and they just go away, right? We had the salt typhoon intrusions into our telco, pretty heinous intrusions. We've had the pre-positioning in critical infrastructure, pretty heinous strategic advantage for China.
And we didn't curl up and say, we're going away, we're getting out of the cyber business, right? You now have congressmen and even administration people pounding on the table saying, we need more cyber, right? And so I don't see the effect that they've brought deterring us. So why do you assume if we bring something, it will deter them? I think there is a strong assumption we're doing the same.
We certainly have amazing, very capable cyber operators between CyberCom, NSA, CIA, the defensive capabilities of CISA, the FBI. We are well-resourced and large, not as large as the Chinese assets, but we have impressive capabilities that hasn't deterred China. It's motivated them. in some sense, right, to be better and bigger.
But the thing that really differentiates us is we are a rule of law country. And there is an effort in the law of armed conflict where you need to be differentiating military targets from civilian targets. You need to have proportionality. The things you do must impact the military effects more than the civilian effects.
And so when people say we ought to turn the lights off and shut off the water and stop the planes or crash trains, We don't do that because it's disproportionate on the civilian population. And that's where the differences arise. We would never get through the lawyers the ability to hold them at risk the way they're currently in some of our infrastructure. And that's the differentiator.
But I say all of that, and now you've got a new administration. that is willing to put the dial on 11. And if you talk to folks in the administration, you talk to folks on the Hill, there's certainly a strong desire to have more capability in the cyber offensive arena unleashed. So we'll see where that goes.
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Chapter 8: How is the cyber workforce adapting to evolving threats?
Now, to your point about what's happening on the inside of CISA, I've been gone for, I think it's two months today. And from what I've heard and what I've been reading, there have been layoffs, largely the probationary folks. Now, we built CISA from about 2000 to about 3500 when I left. As you said, we hired over 2000 amazing, amazing people.
And I understand that they have let probationary folks off, but now they're rehiring them. Look, at the end of the day, my key message is the type of firings that are going on
are really going to discourage the talent that the federal government needs to be able to defend and protect the American people from joining the federal government, whether it's CISA, whether it's the intelligence community. And I know people are sort of dismissive to this idea of joining the federal government. I spent most of my life in the federal government.
What I would say is these are not bureaucrats, which has frankly been used as a pretty pejorative term. These are public servants who want to defend their nation, who willingly raise their right hand to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They're doing it because they believe in America.
They want to defend the American people and democracy. And my one message to anybody currently in the government is, yes, preserve the capability for us to be able to defend the nation, but also make sure that you are taking care of your workforce and your troops because they are there to take care of America.
One thing that came up a bunch in these interviews is that Xi Jinping was watching very carefully what happened with Putin's invasion to Ukraine. And Jen, you said Ukraine's defense is the deterrence on Taiwan. So I'll put this to you first, David, and then maybe you, Jim.
But first to you, David, since you're the only one who's spent significant time living inside China, what do you think Xi is thinking? What are his takeaways right now watching this administration's current approach to Ukraine?
I would imagine his takeaways are celebratory, that he sees a bit of chaos in the US. If they're laying off at CISA, he's like, wow, this advantage is going to come even faster. And I think back to the earlier question that it's not just about Taiwan. I think even if Taiwan were not the case, they would still be in the infrastructure. It's about leverage. It's about the rise of China.
challenging the U.S. in every realm. We're talking a lot about infrastructure, which is important, but they want to challenge the U.S. in everything, the top universities, the top AI, our own semiconductors. They want to be self-sufficient. So Xi Jinping, I think, is really looking at what's happening in the U.S. and saying, this is a great opportunity for us.
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