The 52-page report, released on Sept. 12, was a joint venture between the Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee and the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

It follows questions from congressional and Senate leaders in the spring surrounding the use of communication equipment discovered on Chinese-manufactured cranes.

The report detailed the rising threat to the U.S. maritime supply chain and national security posed by Chinese-made equipment that could be accessed by Beijing’s military.

The CCP mandates that Chinese companies cooperate with state intelligence agencies.

A joint statement about the report from Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), Mark Green (R-Tenn.), and Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) said the United States was risking its economic security for short-term financial gain by purchasing Chinese equipment for U.S. infrastructure.

“We have given the CCP the ability to track the movement of goods through our ports or even halt port activity at the drop of a hat,” they stated.

“Amid China’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific, our greatest geopolitical adversary could wield this power to influence global military and commercial activity in the event of escalation.”

The U.S. maritime sector is “dangerously reliant” on equipment and technology that has been manufactured and assembled in China, such as ship-to-shore cranes and container handling equipment, according to the report.

With financial support from Beijing, state-controlled Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industry Co. (ZPMC) dominates the global maritime equipment and technology market, the report said.

Retired Army Col. John Mills previously told The Epoch Times that the cranes are believed to be an extension of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) global cybercrime operation, which could be used to disrupt U.S. ports during an invasion of Taiwan.

“Those container cranes are not cranes,” Col. Mills said. “They’re IP endpoints on a worldwide intelligence collection system.”

The report also noted that Chinese state-owned enterprises, including ZPMC, have made concerted efforts to increase their influence through underpricing equipment and technology, making it more attractive than their competitors.

ZPMC equipment company accounts for nearly 80 percent of the ship-to-shore cranes used by U.S. ports.

Cargo cranes are necessary for the U.S. maritime sector to conduct international trade and military logistical operations during a military conflict.
The report found concerns with ZPMC, which has publicly denied being a cybersecurity threat to the United States.

One problem noted in the document was that ZPMC or its contractors installed cellular modems onto cranes that are currently operational at certain U.S. ports. No contract to install these modems exists.

ZPMC has repeatedly requested remote access to its cranes operating at U.S. ports, with a particular focus on those located on the West Coast, the report said.

That could give China’s military access to the cranes.

Another issue is that ZPMC’s contract requires that all non-ZPMC crane components be shipped to “Changxing Base” in China by third-party companies, such as Sweden, Germany, and Japan.

There, they are installed by ZPMC engineers without oversight from the original manufacturer, raising red flags, according to the report.

The installation of components takes place at or near the Jiangnan Shipyard, where the People’s Liberation Army Navy builds its most advanced warships and houses its intelligence agencies, it noted.

Another potential problem was that contracts between ZPMC and U.S. ports do not contain provisions prohibiting or limiting unauthorized modifications or access to equipment and technology bound for U.S. ports.

The report recommended quick action on removing or disassembling any connection to cellular modems on Chinese-made cranes.

It called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to issue guidance to all U.S. ports using ZPMC cranes to install operational technology monitoring software.

The report also stated that the United States should help provide cybersecurity and port security to Guam, a strategic U.S. ally in the Pacific.

Midterm goals outlined in the report include congressional action to allocate grant money to ports to offset the cost of buying more expensive cranes made by non-adversarial nations.

The United States does not manufacture its own maritime cranes and container equipment, leaving it vulnerable. Manufacturing cranes in America should be a long-term goal, the report stated.

Potential military threats to U.S. seaports stemming from China came to light in February 2021.

The report, citing media accounts, noted that the FBI discovered intelligence-gathering equipment on Chinese cargo cranes that arrived at the Port of Baltimore.

That same year, the Defense Intelligence Agency reportedly conducted a classified assessment, finding that Beijing could potentially throttle port traffic or gather intelligence on military equipment being shipped.

In February 2023, the FBI’s Office of the Private Sector issued an advisory highlighting indicators of malicious Chinese activity in the U.S. maritime sector, including unusual visits and unusually low bids or quotes to supply port equipment and services.

In January, FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a congressional hearing that Chinese Volt Typhoon malware embedded in critical infrastructure throughout the United States had been removed.

Wray said the malware was designed to disrupt and destroy U.S. infrastructure, which would likely be coordinated should a conflict break out between the two nations.

In February, President Joe Biden issued an executive order allowing DHS to address maritime cyber threats and establish cybersecurity standards to secure the networks and systems of U.S. ports.

Aaron Pan contributed to this report.

The company was also working with “leading external experts” to fix the issue, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The attack appeared to impact business operations at the company’s north Houston campus, as well as some global connectivity networks, the person said, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The company has asked some staff not to connect to internal networks, the person said. -RTRS 

Halliburton has neither confirmed nor denied the cyber incident but acknowledged an issue affecting some of its systems.

A company spokesperson told CNN:

“We are aware of an issue affecting certain company systems and are working diligently to assess the cause and potential impact.”

“We have activated our pre-planned response plan and are working internally and with leading experts to remediate the issue.”

It’s unclear if the cyber incident is a ransomware attack.

In 2021, the ransomware group DarkSide disrupted operations across the Colonial Pipeline network, which carries gasoline and jet fuel up and down the East Coast.

A notable cyber incident unfolded in June when software provider CDK Global sparked chaos for thousands of auto dealers across the US.

The cyber incident at Halliburton serves as yet another critical reminder that hackers could paralyze companies operating critical infrastructure, such as those in the energy sector, at any time.

Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, declined to say if they had further information substantiating the campaigns’ suggestion that it was targeted by Iran.

Cheung said, “On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee.”

According to Washington Examiner:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has reported it has been hacked, and Politico confirmed confidential memos from the campaign were sent to them.

“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

Cheung did not provide confirmation to Politico for how he knew the hackers were from Iran.

The news outlet reported they received documents from a person who called themselves only “Robert” from an AOL email account, and the records included research on Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Marco Rubio (R-FL).

After the assassination attempt on Trump, reports emerged that there had been unrelated Iranian plots to kill the former president. In his statement to the outlet, Cheung referred to those reports as he accused Iran of this hacking.

Politico described in an article how they came into possession of the information and hinted at some of the data in it:

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

The person said they had a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.”

Asked how they obtained the documents, the person responded: “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.”

This is a breaking story and will be updated when more is known.

Today, it’s free speech video platform Rumble and their supporting project, Locals, that have been targeted. China is currently being blamed for the attack by some, but there are those who believe it is an attack by other elements who want free speech quashed.

Popular podcaster Viva Frei noted on Twitter:

I was planning to go live, but Rumble and Locals are down. Apparently it is a massive, unprecedented attack. One that is likely politically motivated.

If I have any updates, I will let everyone know.

Godspeed Rumble!

I was planning to go live, but Rumble and Locals are down. Apparently it is a massive, unprecedented attack. One that is likely politically motivated.

If I have any updates, I will let everyone know.

Godspeed Rumble!#RumbleUnderAttack

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) December 11, 2023

This was confirmed by Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski:

I can confirm that this attack has been unprecedented and has been happening since this weekend.

I also suspect it is political, coming from activists and/or organizations who want to censor our creators, and related to J6 videos being posted on Rumble.

I can confirm that this attack has been unprecedented and has been happening since this weekend.

I also suspect it is political, coming from activists and/or organizations who want to censor our creators, and related to J6 videos being posted on Rumble. https://t.co/tGomVXxEzN

— Chris Pavlovski (@chrispavlovski) December 11, 2023

According to 100% Fed Up:

Online hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have infiltrated critical services in the United States, according to a report by The Washington Post.

Hackers reportedly targeted key services, such as power grids and ports.

“A utility in Hawaii, a West Coast port and a pipeline are among the victims in the past year, officials say,” the outlet wrote.

“It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of conflict,” Brandon Wales, Executive Director of DHS Cyber Security Agency, said.

Whoever is behind it, this attack is massive in scale and has the potential to spark long-term disruptions of sites, apps, and services across the internet.

Sound off about this news on my Substack.

This story is developing and will be updated when more information is available.

A considerable number of user ancestry files were exposed during a recent cyberattack on genetic testing giant, 23andMe. As per an official filing released on Friday, cybercriminals infiltrated around 14,000 user accounts – a figure that equates to approximately 0.1% of the company’s global customer base of over 14 million.

The hackers leveraged a common cyberattack technique known as “credential stuffing.” This involved exploiting leaked account passwords to gain unauthorized access. However, the attack didn’t end with the initial victims. 23andMe incorporates a feature whereby users can opt to share selected information with other users. Consequently, the breach also extended to individuals linked through this feature.

What amplifies the gravity of the data breach is the nature of the exposed information — mainly personal user ancestry details, and in some cases, health-related genetic information. The exact number of affected ‘other users’ or the precise extent of accessed files remains unclear as the company has yet to release specific figures.

Tech news outlet TechCrunch undertook an analysis of the exposed datasets, comparing them against publicly accessible genealogy databases. The website found considerable overlap between the leaked datasets and established genealogy records.

In the aftermath of the initial breach disclosure in October, the hackers advertised the alleged data of one million users of Jewish Ashkenazi descent and 100,000 Chinese users on a prominent hacking forum. This preceded a subsequent advertisement of the supposed records of four million more users. Intriguingly, TechCrunch discovered a precursor to these developments where a hacker advertised a staggering 300 terabytes of stolen 23andMe user data and sought up to $50 million for its entirety.

Sound off about this story on The Liberty Daily Substack.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

More telling is the group’s attitude toward what it called “mal-information” – typically information that is true, but contrary to the preferred narratives of the censor. Dr. Starbird wrote in an email, “Unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms …” Therein lies a dilemma for the censors, as Starbird wrote: “So, do we bend into a pretzel to counter bad faith efforts to undermine CISA’s mission? Or do we put down roots and own the ground that says this tactic is part of the suite of techniques used to undermine democracy?”

It is chilling that there is no consideration of whether the information is true or of the public’s right to know it. “Democracy” in this formulation is whatever maintains the government’s narrative.

Accordingly, the group discussed recommendations for countering “dangerously inaccurate health advice.” It contemplated the roles of the FBI and Homeland Security in addressing “domestic threats,” and a CISA staffer felt the need to remind the subcommittee “of CISA’s limitations in countering politically charged narratives.”

CISA couldn’t censor all the people the advisors wanted. And it could face the same outrage that greeted President Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board, led by singing censor Nina Jankowicz. Americans didn’t want that body deciding what they could say, and Biden shut it down within three weeks. CISA’s advisers were acutely aware their work could be conflated with that of the DGB, and even considered changing the name of the MDM subcommittee. Dr. Starbird noted in an email that she’d “removed ‘monitoring’ from just about every place where it appeared” and made “other defensive word changes/deletions.” Similarly, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde “cautioned the group against pursuing any social listening recommendations” for the time being.

The group also sought cover from outside and inside the government. They spent an inordinate amount of time talking about “socializing” the committee and its work – something DGB apparently hadn’t done. And like a partisan campaign, they looked for natural allies. Meeting notes record that they sought to “identify a point of contact from a progressive civil rights and civil liberties angle to recruit as a [subject matter expert].”

A government committee that seeks partisan allies, obfuscates its purpose, and can’t even be honest about the nature of its members’ participation is going to sort out online truth for Americans? Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex.