DHS cyber office hosting webinars on China

The Department of Homeland Security’s top cyber official is hosting a series of webinars with company stakeholders in an attempt to facilitate discussions about malicious Chinese cyber activity.

Christopher Krebs, the first director of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said this communication is a “foundational activity” he hopes will encourage increased sharing between his agency and their businesses.

“The objective of the webinar is to help folks understand, identify and reduce vulnerabilities and threats. What we want to do is to get them to come back and work with us in the event that they find something,” Krebs told The Hill in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

Krebs listed a series of sectors that China is likely to target and said Beijing has made it clear it wants to grow in these areas.

“One of the things we are trying to educate is if you are in a strategic sector — those include robotics and automated machine tools, next generation information technology, biotechnology, aircraft and aircraft components, clean energy vehicles, and electrical generation and transmission — if you are in one of those sectors, and if you do business in China, you are a target,” Krebs said.

Krebs said these Chinese hackers were looking to compromise managed service providers (MSPs) to get to their customers — it was using their MSPs as the jumping off point to get to the true intended target.

The webinar set for Wednesday afternoon has reached capacity at 2000 participants, Krebs said, who added that they have several others that they are scheduling that are also quickly filling up. A second one is scheduled for next week.