Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks
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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
War Game Pits Taiwan’s Telecom Sector Against China
A concerted Chinese attempt to take over neighboring Taiwan is more likely to involve “cyber-enabled economic warfare” rather than outright invasion, warns a Washington, D.C. national security think tank.
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It would involve Beijing converting today’s mostly episodic hacking incidents and military exercises into a sustained campaign of “gray zone pressure,” such as one that systemically stresses Taiwanese communication infrastructure past the capacity of backups, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The neoconservative center ran a tabletop exercise in Taiwan simulating a Chinese effort to degrade the island’s communications sector, briefing the results to the Taiwanese president and national security team.
Beijing has long asserted sovereignty over Taiwan but efforts at coercion gained new resolve under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping – who only months ago told a Taiwanese opposition leader that his government will “absolutely not tolerate” independence for Taiwan. Xi has ordered his military to be ready for a cross-strait invasion by 2027, although Reuters reported Oct. 1 that U.S. officials now believe China is likely to wait for the results of Taiwan’s 2028 national elections before considering military force.
But, “China does not need a blockade or a quarantine or an invasion to create strategic pressure on Taiwan,” Craig Singleton, a former U.S. diplomat who leads FDD’s China program told reporters Tuesday.
“Communications disruption can impose costs on its own, amplify problems in sectors like energy and transportation, and enable broader, coercive or military operations,” he added.
Singleton played the role of Xi during the exercise and told reporters he was careful not to offer the United States a clear excuse to intervene. “A cable break by itself is manageable. A cellular outage, temporary, is manageable. A cyber intrusion is manageable,” he said of the Taiwanese response. “The problem emerges when those pressures start interacting with one another, and when China watches how Taiwan adapts.”
Singleton said he chose not to stage a dramatic blackout. Instead, he at first mixed scattered cell service problems with disinformation, introduced modest interference with satellite links and made maritime activity near undersea cables more frequent and harder to read.
The aim was to leave residents unsure how long the disruptions would last – and whether to believe their government.
Taiwan’s side, which included telecom operators, absorbed most of that opening pressure. Carriers shifted traffic onto other routes and relied on spare systems and domestic roaming agreements while the Ministry of Digital Affairs coordinated. But Singleton said every one of those responses also revealed to Beijing who Taipei would depend on in a crisis.
Singleton amped up the pressure by breaching government websites, knocking out power substations serving telecom facilities and cutting several international subsea cables – maxing out the cable capacity that remained – and putting heavy load on microwave and satellite backups. Singleton said the day turned on endurance: how long those alternatives could carry the load together while China kept adjusting.
Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral who now directs FDD’s cybersecurity policy center, said decision makers in games he has played in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Taiwan tend to expect systems back within hours after a cyber-enabled disruption, while in his experience restoration takes far longer, sometimes weeks. In Taiwan, he said that years of rapid economic growth have left infrastructure in energy, communications and financial services struggling to keep pace.
Satellite links, one of Taiwan’s main fallbacks, were also stressed in the game. “Satellites are redundancy. They’re not immunity,” Singleton said. Ground equipment and software can be targeted and that service relies on the power grid and on commercial companies.
The point behind the ratcheting breakdowns was to convey a message to the Taiwanese government “that it could not simply engineer its way out of this problem forever,” Singleton said. “I could push into communications. I could let those effects migrate to the electrical grid’s daily economic activity. I could make restoration a lot harder, but I could also reduce the pressure. And that ability to calibrate really matters because the political message becomes: There’s a pathway back to normal. Beijing wants a change in behavior in return.”
Taiwan’s ability to resist such a coercive campaign hinges on how much resilience it can build into its communication sector and how strong its international relationship is with Japan and the U.S. – whether those allies respond by sending undersea cable repair vessels, cyber teams, insurance guarantees and satellite capacity, Singleton said.
Montgomery ranked Taiwan’s societal resilience behind Ukraine and Israel but well ahead of the U.S., where he said preparedness for cyber-enabled economic coercion is badly lacking. He pointed to Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercise in August, when authorities temporarily curbed all but emergency mobile services in parts of the island. A U.S. governor or mayor would risk impeachment for agreeing to a similar test, he said.
With reporting by ISMG’s David Perera in Northern Virginia.
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