China Is ‘Prepositioning’ for Future Cyberattacks—and the New NSA Chief Is Worried

SINGAPORE—As the U.S. military’s new cyber chief and the head of the nation’s main electronic spy agency, it is Gen. Timothy Haugh’s job to be concerned about China’s clandestine efforts to steal sensitive American data and weapons know-how.

But he is also contending with an unusual Chinese threat, one that is designed not to extract military secrets or data of any kind but to lurk in the infrastructure that undergirds civilian life, as if lying in wait for the right moment to unleash chaos.

“We see it as very unique and different—and also concerning,” Haugh said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on the sidelines of a security conference in Singapore. “And the concern is both in what is being targeted and then how it is being targeted.”

The U.S. believes the Chinese hacking network—known as Volt Typhoon among cybersecurity experts and U.S. officials—aims to “preposition” in critical infrastructure networks for future attacks. “We can see no other use,” said Haugh, who took charge of the National Security Agency and the military’s Cyber Command in February.

“We see attempts to be latent in a network that is critical infrastructure, that has no intelligence value, which is why it is so concerning,” he said.

Unlike other state-backed hackers who typically use tools to target a network and then take data, these Chinese intrusions involve neither. “One of the reasons we believe it is prepositioning is—there are not tools being put down and there’s not data being extracted,” Haugh said.

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