Bloomberg’s Katrina Manson reports on how the threat of Chinese hacking has become real in the United States territory of Guam.
Melvyn Kwek figured out something was wrong when US federal agents began to visit him in 2022. “Could you take a look at your network?” they asked Kwek, who’d been running cybersecurity at the Guam Power Authority, an autonomous agency of the island’s government, for the previous six years. And then, more furtively, “Could we take a look at your network?”
Looking at a network, in this case, meant analyzing the vast amount of data traffic flowing through its routers and switches—often for months at a time—in search of tiny anomalies that might indicate foul play. Kwek had little idea why the agents were so worried, and he was pretty sure that his four-person staff wasn’t up to the task. “I didn’t expect to be dealing with national security threats,” he says, recounting the interactions while visiting a cluster of the GPA’s substations, where some rickety wire fencing serves as the only true protection. “But I am now.” And then a breath. “Yeah.”
This is the latest page in the story of the US-China rivalry brewing in the Pacific.
0 Comments