by the National Counterintelligence and Security Center

“ Building an effective response demands understanding economic espionage as a worldwide, multi-vector threat to the integrity of both the U.S. economy and global trade. Whereas cyberspace is a preferred operational domain for economic espionage, it is but one of many. Sophisticated threat actors, such as adversarial nation-states, combine cyber exploitation with supply chain operations, human recruitment, and the acquisition of knowledge by foreign students in U.S. universities, as part of a strategic technology acquisition program. ”

“ Cloud networks and IoT infrastructure are rapidly expanding the global online operational space. Threat actors have already demonstrated how cloud can be used as a platform for cyber exploitation. As IoT and AI applications expand to empower everything from “smart homes” to “smart cities”, billions of potentially unsecured network nodes will create an incalculably larger exploitation space for cyber threat actors. ”

“ The solidification of cloud computing over the past decade as a global information industry standard, coupled with the deployment of technologies such as AI and IoT, will introduce unforeseen vulnerabilities to U.S. networks. ”