Digital risks to critical infrastructure, data and information systems, and from artificial intelligence are multiplying. On the fifth episode of our series exploring what President Trump’s second term means for tech, WSJ reporter Dustin Volz joins host Belle Lin to talk about how Trump’s approach to securing the digital realm could play out over the next four years, and why AI is only part of the big picture.
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[00:00:32] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, January 31st. I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal. All this week, we are exploring what President Trump's second term could mean for the tech industry over the next four years and beyond. Cybersecurity threats are ever increasing for businesses, consumers, and the government.
[00:00:54] Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that hackers linked to China, Iran, and other foreign governments are using new artificial intelligence tech to bolster their cyberattacks against the U.S. and other global targets. We'll speak with our reporter, Dustin Volz, about how government hackers are using AI chatbots and the implications of a new AI model from the Chinese firm DeepSeq.
[00:01:21] Then we'll discuss how the new Trump administration looks at cybersecurity and why we're likely to see a more aggressive response to cyberattacks. So, Dustin, what exactly are these AI-enabled hackers doing? And how do we know they're doing it? Well, they're likely using all sorts of generative AI platforms. But in this case, the research is from Google's Gemini chatbot.
[00:01:48] That's the research that we had an exclusive look at. And what it shows is that dozens of different hacking groups in China, Iran, and elsewhere were turning to Gemini to try to bolster their cyberattacks. And what has Google said about this so far? Google issued this research in a bid for transparency to basically to say, look, we know that bad actors are using our chatbot and seeking to weaponize generative AI for their malicious gain.
[00:02:18] And here's sort of a rundown of what we're seeing. And in doing so, they also said they took actions against accounts that they identified as linked to these bad actors and suspended them. In addition to that, it just highlights that generative AI, like for a lot of ordinary people, can be enormously useful for sort of on-the-margin productivity hacks. You can use it to help write emails and craft cover letters.
[00:02:42] Similarly, these hackers are sort of using it for almost rudimentary or mundane tasks like researching organizations that they want to target with phishing attacks, for example. And what we're seeing so far is this is a preview of what's to come. And at least for right now, it doesn't seem to be some sort of doomsday scenario where these hackers are creating first of their kind, never before seen attacks that are destroying the Internet.
[00:03:06] Right. And we've also this week seen the emergence of the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which says that it rivals top tier AI models from the US for just a fraction of the cost. What are some of the national security implications of a model like the one from DeepSeek? Well, there's a lot of national security implications, according to US officials, about any Chinese technology. And DeepSeek is sort of just the latest to animate some concerns.
[00:03:33] For starters, we've seen agencies already instruct their employees to not use DeepSeek because you've got to think about the level of intelligence that you could glean from just being able to see what people are writing into these systems. In addition to that, the concerns about DeepSeek are that this is revealing or reflecting that the US is not nearly as far ahead on the AI arms race as they hoped or wanted to believe that they were.
[00:03:59] Now, there's a lot of dispute about this because of uncertainty about exactly how DeepSeek was able to accomplish what it did and whether or not it really is as cheap as its boosters are saying it is. But this is really just the latest flashpoint in US-China relations over technology and the bout for technological supremacy between the two.
[00:04:22] Finally, another area of concern is that DeepSeek, like TikTok, could be used to either promote propaganda or respond to questions for information and data in a way that is advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party. For example, a lot of people on social media this week were noting that DeepSeek, if you ask it about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, it basically says that it's unable to process that question and cannot answer it.
[00:04:50] That's a very different answer than the one you'll get from ChatGPT or Gemini or other chatbots that are built by US companies. Coming up, how will the Trump administration handle some of the biggest cyber threats facing the nation? That's after the break. So let's take a step back here.
[00:05:20] Former President Biden issued an 11th hour cyber executive order right before he left office. Do we have a sense for how the Trump administration feels about this executive order and what was in it? So senior Biden administration officials really tried on their way out the door to stress that cybersecurity has been a largely bipartisan issue for a long time.
[00:05:44] And there's nothing super controversial in the executive order that they issued. But it is a lengthy one with sort of a grab bag of different issues that it addresses, including redefining who the government can sanction to include ransomware criminal groups, for example, and mandating that software suppliers to the federal government verify and sort of publicly audit the fact that their software is known to be secure and a whole host of other things.
[00:06:13] There's also a number of things that the Biden administration did to create cybersecurity mandates on a variety of industries, including after the Colonial Pipeline hack of 2021, which led to the longest conduit of fuel on the East Coast was shut down. Generally, we hadn't seen much of that prior to the last administration because for a long time, government basically pursued a view of cybersecurity that industry should be voluntary in its cooperation with security standards.
[00:06:39] But that's the best way to get businesses big and small to adopt best practices. But as bad things continue to happen every year with nation state hacking and ransomware and all sorts of other terrible things, the Biden administration started pursuing a mandated approach rather than a voluntary arrangement. And Republicans have generally been much more hostile to that type of framework.
[00:07:07] On the other hand, a lot of the worst hacking that we're seeing is coming from China. And the Trump administration is setting itself up to be very, very hawkish on China. Some of the other officials that Trump has tapped for key positions, like the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said that China is a really serious cybersecurity threat and we need to do everything we can to address it. Specifically, there's the salt typhoon telecom attack, which was hugely significant.
[00:07:37] It happened during the Biden administration, but now its after effects continue into the Trump administration. Are there other sort of categories of big threats, maybe from foreign actors, nation states, especially from China, that the Trump administration will have to deal with? The salt typhoon intrusions in the telecom networks is certainly top of mind for everybody in cybersecurity right now.
[00:08:02] It is an enormously significant hack that has serious counterintelligence implications and ensnared the phone calls of President Trump and Vice President Vance. Right before the Biden administration left office, they took some actions against China by sanctioning the Chinese technology firm, the contractor that they said was working for Chinese intelligence to carry out those intrusions.
[00:08:29] The Trump administration officials, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, formerly a Florida congressman, have said that they want to be more aggressive in responding to these types of attacks, that they want to go on offense essentially in cyberspace. One thing that is always helpful in figuring out what an administration might do is what they've done in the past. And so we can look to the first Trump administration.
[00:08:55] And among the things that President Trump did during his first term was basically unshackle U.S. Cyber Command, the military's cyber outfit for sort of offensive cyber strikes and theaters of war and elsewhere. He basically allowed for them to pursue cyber attacks against adversaries with fewer bureaucratic restraints and fewer interagency debate about those types of things.
[00:09:19] So we saw that in the first Trump administration, and that was actually kept in place largely by the Biden administration. Now, the second term, we are likely to see further efforts to pursue that kind of response to various attacks. And so that could be disruptive operations against certainly, you know, terrorist groups potentially, but also nation states could be on the receiving end of that.
[00:09:43] And also stepped up espionage, something that CIA director John Ratcliffe has talked a great deal about, is wanting to pursue more aggressive spycraft against China as well. Okay, last question for you, Justin. You cover cybersecurity as well as Capitol Hill very closely. What are you most keeping your eye on now that we are several days into the new Trump administration, whether in the coming days ahead or maybe even further, the weeks and the months ahead? Well, there's this significant shakeup right now in the federal workforce.
[00:10:11] On January 20th, the day Trump was inaugurated, the acting DHS secretary issued a memo to all advisory committees at DHS, essentially disbanding them and terminating the work that they were doing. And that included the Cyber Safety Review Board, which was in the middle of a months-long investigation into China's salt typhoon hacks of U.S. telecoms. Again, this is a hack that ensnared Trump's own cell phone calls for surveillance.
[00:10:40] And now the work of that board has been terminated entirely. And this is just sort of to further the efforts by the Trump administration to reduce federal work, federal agency headcount, to upend a lot of federal protections, to install a lot of people who are seemingly loyal or seen as loyal to the Trump agenda in not just senior roles, but in the rank and file of the federal government.
[00:11:07] One thing I'm going to be watching very closely, as others will be, too, is how do these drastic changes in the federal workforce potentially impact U.S. national cybersecurity? And are we going to see people leaving either voluntarily or by being pushed out? And is there going to be a brain drain? Are there going to be different people brought on board who are going to take those jobs and run with them? This is all sort of a huge question mark.
[00:11:37] And to some extent, you have this with every administration with any transition. But clearly, you're seeing a great deal more of uncertainty and anxiety about what people are going to be doing and whether or not their jobs are even going to exist a day from now, a week from now, a month from now, let alone a year or two from now. That was our reporter, Dustin Boltz. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. Logging off for The Weeknd, I'm your host, Belle Lin.
[00:12:05] Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop. Our development producer is Aisha El-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Sinsley are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We will sign back in this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.