East vs. West – The Chip Wars are in Full Effect
Welcome to the Winter 2023 edition of the Below the Surface Threat Report.
Every nation state has long realized that whichever nations win the race to quantum computing and AI superiority will likely dominate the global landscape. This has created a race to produce the infrastructure and computing that is fundamentally required to win the race. The US has been bringing chip manufacturing back to CONUS and strong allies like Japan. However, like any war, the Chip Wars have also forced nations to take drastic steps to skirt sanctions in an effort to keep up. “Anything goes” seems to be the mantra, as the US discovers illicit secret chip factories in China, as China lures overseas chip talent to offset its weaknesses in the design phase of the supply chain, and as Chinese hackers continue to steal source code, SDK’s and IC designs from western chip manufacturers.
This dynamic also brings with it cybersecurity and cyber supply chain implications, and affects what one might describe as “Digital Supply Chain Safety”. Whether it’s the Defense Industrial Base worried about “Mutually Unassured Destruction” (MUD) or the West’s critical infrastructure withstanding an onslaught of cyber attacks leveraging digital supply chain vulnerabilities, one thing is for certain: it’s only going to escalate for the foreseeable future, and now is the time to mitigate the risks before the impact reaches its full potential.
While the theme for this report is East vs. West Chip Wars, we’ll also cover other areas such as Compliance, Iranian state actors, Ukraine cyber events, hacktivists and criminal hacker groups.
