By Nick Pope | The Daily Caller
The Chinese government is conducting espionage activities on such a broad scale that Western governments are struggling to keep Beijing’s spying in check, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
In just the last month, the FBI said that Chinese government-linked hackers breached 260,000 internet-connected devices across the U.S. and Europe, while federal officials alleged that a former top aide to Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was a Chinese agent and a congressional report found that Chinese-made cargo cranes at America’s ports contained technology that would allow China to control them discreetly, according to the WSJ. Western intelligence agencies are sounding the alarm and asking the public to be vigilant for possible Chinese spying, but deep economic ties between China and the West are making espionage detection a difficult task.
China’s network of state-backed hackers is enormous, and it is thought to outnumber the FBI’s cyber personnel by a ratio of about 50-to-1, with some estimates calculating that China may have as many as 600,000 people working on cyber operations, according to the WSJ.