ACTIVE STANCE:
The elite ‘cyber hunt team’ would be established to counter China’s cyber units, scouring the nation’s systems for hackers and backdoors, an official said
By Lo Tien-bin / Staff reporter
The Ministry of National Defense (MND) has proposed a NT$95.93 million (US$3.03 million) budget for next year to establish a new “military cyber hunt team” that would counter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) increasing cyberinfiltration and “gray zone” threats.
The plan was revealed in the central government’s general budget proposal for the next fiscal year, under the ministry’s Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command.
The initiative marks a shift in the military’s cyberwarfare mindset — upgrading from a “defensive cybersecurity” strategy that relies on setting up firewalls to an “integrated offense and defense” strategy that seeks out and eliminates network blind spots.
Photo: AFP
The command’s training program involves active cyber threat hunting, the highest level of cybersecurity expertise, and has drawn high attention within military and cybersecurity communities.
Military cybersecurity had mostly relied on alerts and would scramble to patch vulnerabilities after a breach was detected, but the initiative’s training program would operate on the premise that “the system has been infiltrated.”
Foreign instructors would introduce live-combat adversarial training modeled after the US military’s Cyber Flag exercise. The goal is to teach Taiwan’s military personnel to act like detectives, sifting through billions of system logs and network traffic to hunt down and uncover enemy hackers who have bypassed defenses in military networks and critical infrastructure during peacetime.
A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said command head Lieutenant General Mao Chien-chiu (毛建秋) is establishing the team to counter the CCP’s cyber units, especially threats from their “long-term latency” and “continuous engagement” tactics.
State-sponsored hackers are skilled at advanced persistent threat attacks, often remaining dormant for months or even years after infiltrating Taiwan’s military systems, quietly stealing confidential data or waiting for the suitable time for destruction, they said.
Members of the “military cyber hunt team” would act as “scavengers” of the digital domain, completely eliminating these latent ghosts and backdoors before enemy attacks are launched, the official said.
The initiative also aligns with international standards, and would deepen joint defense between Taiwan and the US.
The US military has emphasized the importance of “persistent engagement” and “defend forward” cybersecurity strategies, saying that one cannot simply sit back and wait to be attacked, but must instead engage adversaries in the gray zone, the official said.
With the combat experience of elite foreign instructors, the command is expected to speed up its transformation into an “elite cyber tactical force,” which would maintain the resilience of key civilian infrastructure and military command systems in peacetime, and — with its shared technical protocols — swiftly engage in cross-border cybercodefense with like-minded allies during wartime, they said.
The initiative’s budget signals a profound strategic shift in the military’s digital warfare mindset.
In modern wars, cyberwarfare and electronic warfare would paralyze the command chain before the first wave of missiles hits. The establishment of the team aims to expose forces hidden in the shadows, and to reclaim dominance in the digital realm, ensuring that military command and communication systems can function reliably in case of a conflict and to safeguard overall national security.
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