FBI Director Christopher Wray and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chief Jen Easterly offered new details this week of a thwarted Chinese government-linked effort to hack critical U.S. infrastructure, sounding the alarm that Beijing’s infiltration attempts are escalating and poised to induce chaos if left unchecked.

The warning came Wednesday during a House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher said Beijing-backed hackers have spent 20 years planting malware into systems that control U.S. infrastructure. He described the situation as “the cyberspace equivalent of placing bombs on American bridges, water treatment facilities and power plants.”

This comes amid revelations from Microsoft that hackers from the Russia-backed “Midnight Blizzard“ operation have not only breached emails of the U.S. software giant’s executives, but also targeted other organizations, indicating more potential victims are in the cyberattackers’ crosshairs than previously understood.

The Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, meanwhile, is facing mounting scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Mr. Wray warned lawmakers Wednesday there’s little to stop China’s Communist regime from tinkering with the inner workings of TikTok — a platform with more than 150 million U.S. users — to influence and misinform American voters ahead of November’s election.

Our new Threat Status special video series explores whether TikTok should be banned in the U.S. Mr. Taylor interviews Foundation for Defense of Democracies China Program Director Craig Singleton, who warns that TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, is actively feeding sensitive info on U.S. users into a secret database of the Ministry of State Security — China’s leading intelligence agency, despite the company’s denials.

The European Union has unexpectedly overcome resistance from Hungary — a country with close energy ties to Russia — to approve a major new aid package for Ukraine just weeks ahead of the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The development comes just after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made the rounds in Washington to push for an increase in U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Russia continues to hit Ukrainian cities with missiles, but the fight is not one-sided: Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn reports that Ukrainian forces have destroyed more than 360 Russian tanks and at least 700 armored combat vehicles since early October.

The Pentagon for years has lacked a “coordinated approach” to detecting, analyzing and cataloging UFO sightings by U.S. service members, according to a newly declassified Defense Department inspector general study.

National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang examined the study, as well as data showing that U.S. military personnel and commercial pilots reported at least 291 UFO sightings since August 2022, with some craft exhibiting “high-speed travel,” “unusual maneuverability” and other strange characteristics.

The plight of Afghan refugees who worked with American diplomats and soldiers prior to the fall of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and the Biden administration’s disastrous troop withdrawal in 2021 continues to worsen.


A newly released report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reports that Pakistan has forced nearly 500,000 Afghans who took refuge in the country to return home over the last four months. Many of those Afghans fled to Pakistan in hopes of connecting with U.S. authorities to acquire special visas — visas they had been promised — to rebuild their lives in America.

The Times’ Stephen Dinan covered the report, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson’s assertion this week that U.S. border security is the GOP’s  “No. 1 priority.” Part of that is the push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a full House vote on which is likely next week.

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea represent a 21st century “axis of tyranny” generating “more significant threats to U.S. national security than ever,” writes former CIA officer and regular Times columnist Daniel Hoffman, who compares this current era of global affairs to the 1920s and 1930s when storm clouds had “gathered on the horizon.” Mr. Hoffman argues that as a “beacon of democracy,” the U.S. and “our NATO partners should enable and leverage allies around the world as “force multipliers,” asserting that “without our leadership and commitment to defend our common values, those allies will be no match against dictators who seek to do us harm.”