Chinese Communist Party officials admitted during a December meeting that they were responsible for years of serious cyberattacks against American infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal wrote Thursday in a bombshell report.

The attacks were conducted by a Chinese cyberespionage unit dubbed Volt Typhoon. The group has been active since mid-2021, using toxic script called “web shell” to give Chinese operatives remote access to servers. This has enabled the Chinese to infiltrate systems related to construction, communications, education, government operations, maritime activity, manufacturing and electric and gas utilities.

United States Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro acknowledged in 2023 that the U.S. Navy “has been impacted” by Volt Typhoon cyberattacks. And the nature of “web shell” means once it is embedded in a given system, the hackers need only wait for the right time to “flip a switch” to execute devastating assaults at the moment they will be the most disruptive to America.

The U.S. State Department called the infiltrations “some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security.”

Analysts believe the overarching purpose of Volt Typhoon’s campaign is to cripple America’s capacity to communicate and react in future crises. And the main future crisis the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) is preparing for is the conquest of Taiwan.

In the past, ccp officials have either blamed rogue actors for conducting the Volt Typhoon attacks or denied that they happened altogether. But during the December meeting, Wang Lei, a cyberofficial with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and his team indicated that the ccp was behind the attacks and that they were due to America’s support for Taiwan. The admission “startled American officials,” who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the Wall Street Journal wrote.

“China wants U.S. officials to know that, yes, they do have this capability, and they are willing to use it,” said Dakota Cary, a China expert at the SentinelOne cybersecurity company.

On several occasions, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has discussed the dangers of America’s—particularly the U.S. military’s—dependence on computer systems that are vulnerable to sabotage. In a January 1995 Trumpet article, he quoted analyst Joseph de Courcy, who called this “the Western world’s Achilles’ heel”—a reference to the almost invincible hero of Greek mythology who was susceptible to injury only on his heels.

“America is the greatest superpower this world has ever known,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “But we have a very vulnerable point in our military—our own Achilles’ heel.” This vulnerable spot “is so dangerous that I am amazed it hasn’t received more publicity” (ibid).

Mr. Flurry said de Courcy’s warning about this glaring danger reminded him of a Bible prophecy in Ezekiel 7. The chapter’s first three verses show that God is addressing “the land of Israel” in the time of “the end,” which means primarily the U.S. and Britain in our modern age. (You can prove this by studying our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.)

Ezekiel describes a time in the future when God will punish these nations for their “abominations” and their hatred of His law and authority (verse 8). Verse 14 details one aspect of that punishment: “They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”

Mr. Flurry described this as an “alarming” scripture. It is about a future time when American military technology will have been compromised by adversaries. “It seems everybody is expecting our people to go into battle, but the greatest tragedy imaginable occurs!” Mr. Flurry wrote. “Nobody goes to battle—even though the trumpet is blown! Will it be because of a computer terrorist?”

Isaiah 59 provides more details about the same future time of conflict and confusion. In verses 9 and 10, the peoples of the U.S. and Britain are shown to be stripped of vision: “[W]e wait for light, but behold obscurity; [we wait] for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.”

This passage is accurate in a spiritual sense: America and Britain are already in spiritual darkness and blindness. But it may also have a physical fulfillment. After computer networks of vital government institutions and agencies are infiltrated by hackers from China and other enemy nations, the computer-dependent population would be in the dark. Pilots and other military personnel would be flying blind.

In the June 1999 Trumpet issue, Mr. Flurry again discussed the U.S. military’s dangerous vulnerability to cyberattacks in the context of Bible prophecy. He wrote: “We could lose the next war before we even begin.”

To understand more about America’s perilous cybervulnerability and to see the hopeful message that is connected to these developments, read “China Hacks America—and ‘None Goes to Battle.’”