June 18, 2026: Years ago American CyberWar specialists reminded everyone what Internet security experts have been saying for a long time; China is using the Internet for espionage and more aggressive actions to silence those who criticize or embarrass the Chinese government. Those fears have come to pass with discovery of the Chinese Salt Typhoon long-term CyberWar efforts to infiltrate, map and insert viruses into American telecommunications networks and essential transportation systems.

China’s Salt Typhoon effort integrates the enormous quantities of data produced since the internet emerged in the late 1990s into an espionage system. All that data enables analysts to use AI/Artificial Intelligence powered tools to extract vital, and sometimes top secret, information about what other nations are up to. This system is also useful for stealing, or reinventing, trade secrets and new technologies created outside China.

Salt Typhoon is the name Microsoft applies to an APT/Advanced Persistent Threat based in or working for China. cyber threat group believed to be to be aligned with the People’s Republic of China. Salt Typhoon is known and suspected of hacking into infrastructure like electrical distribution, sewage, operational telemetry and metadata. Salt Typhoon has also compromised internet and commercial communications for the distribution of goods within several countries, including America.

This approach is different in scale and scope because China can lessen friction between state demand and data supply. In China the government forces civilians to support intelligence work. China's use of industrial espionage managed to turn their country into the mightiest industrial and military power on the planet. Since the 1980s, China has been attempting to do what the Soviet Union never accomplished; steal Western technology, then use it to move ahead of the West. The Soviets lacked the many essential supporting industries created and run by entrepreneurs found in the West, and was never able to get all the many pieces needed to match Western technical accomplishments. Soviet copies of American computers, for example, were crude, less reliable and less powerful. Same with their jet fighters, tanks and warships.

China got around this by making it profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things right. At the same time, China allowed hundreds of thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While most of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, some will come back to China, and bring American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the thousand grains of sand approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.

This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other nations have used similar systems for centuries. What is unusual is the scale of the Chinese effort. Backing it all up is a Chinese intelligence bureaucracy back home that is huge, with nearly 100,000 people working just to keep track of the many Chinese overseas, and what they could, or should, be trying to grab for the motherland. It begins when Chinese intelligence officials examine who is going overseas, and for what purpose. Chinese citizens cannot leave the country, legally, without the state security organizations being notified. The intel people are not being asked to give permission. They are being alerted in case they want to have a talk with students, tourists or business people before they leave the country. Interviews are often held when these people come back as well.

Those who might be coming in contact with useful information are asked to remember what they saw, or bring back souvenirs. Over 100,000 Chinese students go off to foreign universities each year. Even more go abroad as tourists or on business. Most of these people were not asked to actually act as spies, but simply to share, with Chinese government officials, who are not always identified as intelligence personnel, whatever information obtained. The more ambitious of these people are getting caught and prosecuted. But the majority, who are quite casual, and, individually, bring back relatively little, are almost impossible to catch.

Like the Russians, the Chinese are also employing the traditional methods, using people with diplomatic immunity to recruit spies, and offering cash, or whatever, to get people to sell them information. This is still effective, and when combined with the thousand grains of sand methods, brings in lots of secrets.

Salt Typhoon is a major advance in data collection, analysis and production of useful information. By using powerful computing systems and AI enabled analysis China can detect espionage networks inside China and other nations. What these espionage teams are after is also revealed. Salt Typhoon is a sign that the future of espionage depends more on AI enabled calculation. For America the task isn’t just procedural but theoretical.