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- [00:03]
Dina Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. The world is watching Ukraine. The war, the weapons, the peace talks. But in the background, there's another place caught in the shadow of a powerful neighbor, one that, like Russia, insists history was never settled. And that's Taiwan. China claims the island is a renegade province. The kind of language that sounds like it could just as easily come from Vladimir Putin as from Xi Jinping. The threats have loomed for both Ukraine and Taiwan for years. But for Taiwan, there's sort of a due date. 2027. That's the year allegedly Xi Jinping told the military to be ready, ready to invade Taiwan. And as the date ticks closer, you can already hear rumblings of the conflict, especially in cyberspace. China's cyber attacks against the island nation have been ramping up.
- [01:14]
Jay Vogt
China is getting more and more aggressive, especially in terms of cyber attacks. Cyber attacks launched on Taiwan's public websites.
- [01:22]
Nina Collars
That attacked thousands of email accounts of.
- [01:24]
Dina Temple Raston
Government officials to steal important data. For Nina Collars, a professor at the U.S. naval War College, the war in Ukraine wasn't just another geopolitical flashpoint. She thought it was something that could be studied not just for its own sake, but on behalf of Taiwan.
- [01:45]
Jay Vogt
So I said, hey, maybe we should think about this. Maybe. Maybe the things that are happening in Ukraine will help us understand what it takes to operate under maybe a crisis. And so maybe we can. Maybe we can kind of apply these lessons. So we referred to that as the Zelenskyy playbook.
- [02:03]
Dina Temple Raston
Nina's work at the Naval War College involves the kind of academic research you'd expect, but also this other thing.
- [02:11]
Nina Collars
So the Naval War College has got this sort of storied history of war gaming.
- [02:16]
Dina Temple Raston
This is Jay Vogt, and he works at the Naval War College with Nina in the war gaming department. That's right. They actually have a war gaming department.
- [02:26]
Nina Collars
And what they do is they put on usually 8 to 10 very large, usually classified war games at the direction of this chief of Naval operations every year.
- [02:37]
Dina Temple Raston
So Jay and Nina start asking, what if we run one of those war games for Taiwan?
- [02:44]
Jay Vogt
It struck me as being this kind of perfect opportunity to really dig down into something that the Navy's deeply concerned about, that, frankly, the Pentagon is deeply concerned about. So we just decided to ask a very simple question. And as is usually the case when Jay and I team up, shenanigans ensue. And then we got this crazy idea to play a war game at defcon.
- [03:10]
Dina Temple Raston
I'm Dena Temple Raston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today, we're looking at Taiwan and how you prepare for a war that hasn't even started yet. We'll take you inside a Navy war game designed to help Taiwan get ready. A war game held for the first time ever in a very unexpected place. Make a hat.
- [03:39]
Jay Vogt
Make a hat.
- [03:40]
Dina Temple Raston
Make a hat, make a hat. Stay with us.
- [03:50]
Morgan Sung
Foreign.
- [03:55]
Dina Temple Raston
Is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states from recorded future news. This is Click here. I'm Dina Temple. Rest. The connection between Ukraine and Taiwan is clear. Both are smaller nations standing at the edge of digital battlegrounds, caught between cyber superpowers. But after that, the differences are striking.
- [04:49]
Jay Vogt
The difficulty that the Taiwanese face from a security perspective is far, far more dire than that of the Ukrainians. They're a small island. There are shallow waters.
- [05:02]
Nina Collars
It's heavily relying on cables and all these other types of things. 90% of its Internet is dependent on subsea cables. Right. That's how most of the traffic is going back and forth.
- [05:13]
Dina Temple Raston
The fact that Ukraine has borders, land borders, points to another distinction between the two countries. That means it's harder for Russia to fully shut down Ukraine's communications systems. In fact, when Russia attempted to do that, Ukraine literally just drove their hard drives across the border to re establish connections elsewhere. But Taiwan's data only has one way off the island, through those undersea cables, many of which are connected to China.
- [05:40]
Nina Collars
Do Taiwan's cables get cut? Yes, they do. Right. It's happened like 27 times over the last five years. I will tell you that the deputy minister of Moda absolutely believes it's being done on purpose. Right.
- [05:52]
Dina Temple Raston
Moda, that's Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs. So Jay and Nina begin researching all these distinctions.
- [06:00]
Jay Vogt
So we thought once we had enough there, we said, okay, let's create a game.
- [06:07]
Dina Temple Raston
Actually, that's where Jay comes in. He's a war game designer. And given Taiwan's particular vulnerabilities, they decided to focus the game on three things. First, protecting the island's communications networks and the infrastructure that depends on them.
- [06:22]
Nina Collars
Compared to Ukraine, compared to a lot of places, Taiwan is one of the most digitally sort of robust and sort of connected nations on the world. So there's just there's a lot of opportunity there for cyber attacks and other types of means of disruption.
- [06:37]
Dina Temple Raston
So not just cutting cables, but hacking systems, which China already does regularly. In fact, just last week, the cybersecurity company Cisco Talos discovered a malicious campaign inside Taiwan's critical infrastructure. They said the hackers have been active in these networks since at least 2023, and they linked them to the Chinese Ministry of State Security. And if there was a full on war, staying connected would not just be about communicating on the island, but also about keeping the rest of the world informed and engaged. Rallying support like President Zelensky did from day one with his selfie video from Kyiv.
- [07:22]
Nina Collars
Zelensky was able to pivot right after the Russian attacks and really make his case to the world. If you're Taiwan and you are down to a soda straw in terms of the number of communications pathways you have, you might not be able to do that as effectively, right? There might be a lot less videos online posted from the population about what's going on because that stuff's just not getting out.
- [07:48]
Dina Temple Raston
And then the third area they decided to focus the war game on was energy. Taiwan is going green, not just for the environment, but to be less dependent on outside energy because right now some 97% of their oil and gas is shipped in.
- [08:06]
Nina Collars
So it's a big problem for them. So they're going big into this green energy space. And we realized pretty quickly that like, this is potentially an area of vulnerabilities.
- [08:16]
Dina Temple Raston
Not because green energy itself is less secure, but because anytime you stitch together new systems, it's complicated and the complexity leads to vulnerabilities. So telecoms, infrastructure, energy. Nina and Jay had chosen their war game focus.
- [08:32]
Jay Vogt
Then Jay said, nina, this is impossible. How are we going to find the expertise to do this? And I said, oh, hold my beer. We can just go to DEF con.
- [08:41]
Dina Temple Raston
DEF con, the world's largest hacking conference.
- [08:44]
Nina Collars
This is the welcoming session.
- [08:46]
Dina Temple Raston
So with that, welcome to DEF con. I am the Dark Tangent.
- [08:55]
Jay Vogt
DEFCON isn't just a bunch of dirty hackers, right? These were maybe dirty hackers 33 years ago, but now these are people who run the community, right?
- [09:04]
Dina Temple Raston
It's a place that brings together thousands of hackers, security researchers, intelligence officials and government operatives to trade knowledge, to push the boundaries of cybersecurity, to break into things just to see if they can.
- [09:18]
Jay Vogt
And I said, well, you know, the thing is we could take it and play it on the floor and find out who wants to think about this problem with us. You know, among 25 or 30,000 of the world's best hackers.
- [09:33]
Dina Temple Raston
For context, war games are usually played in stuffy rooms, think tanks, institutions like the Hoover Institution. Usually people take off work, they fly across the country and sit in rooms filled with government officials and military strategists. But DEF con, it would flip that model on its head. Instead of bringing the experts to the war game, they would bring the war game to the experts.
- [09:58]
Jay Vogt
And so my colleagues were like, that's pretty crazy, but let's see if we can give it a shot.
- [10:04]
Dina Temple Raston
So they started recruiting.
- [10:05]
Jay Vogt
The hacking community operates off a trusted introduction system, so hackers can be suspicious.
- [10:12]
Dina Temple Raston
By nature, especially of institutions. So if Nina wanted to recruit people for this kind of thing, she'd probably need people to vouch for her. People who could say that this was the real deal or somebody's time. Fortunately, Nina had actually been going to DEF CON for years by then. She volunteers there and runs a maritime hacking village. At the conference.
- [10:35]
Jay Vogt
I immediately reached out to people I knew best, and I said, this is what we're thinking about doing. Can you find me the kinds of people with expertise on industrial control systems, on renewable energy, on the communications infrastructure and how it works? And can you bring enough of them together if they're coming to DEF con?
- [10:58]
Dina Temple Raston
She started sending messages.
- [11:00]
Jay Vogt
And so slowly but surely, the networks light up and I get text messages back. My friend of a friend, you should invite this person. So we built out a list, a.
- [11:11]
Dina Temple Raston
List that, as it turns out, was longer than they expected, more people than they could even use. Because if you're a hacker and you get a message from the US Navy that says, hey, are you interested in.
- [11:23]
Jay Vogt
Thinking through this puzzle with us?
- [11:25]
Dina Temple Raston
We're going to play a war game. No one needs to ask you twice.
- [11:28]
Jay Vogt
It's a very, very hard problem, which is part of, I think, one. The hacker community loves hard problems.
- [11:36]
Dina Temple Raston
They had their scope, they had their players. They were ready. But could all of this, this plan, this war game, actually hold up under the chaos of DEF con? Let the war games begin. That's after the break. Stay with us.
- [12:02]
Morgan Sung
Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from kqed, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.
- [12:10]
Dina Temple Raston
You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it.
- [12:15]
Morgan Sung
So my first reaction was, haha, this is so funny.
- [12:17]
Jay Vogt
And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist.
- [12:20]
Morgan Sung
Is this real?
- [12:21]
Nina Collars
And I think we will see a.
- [12:23]
Dina Temple Raston
Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes.
- [12:25]
Morgan Sung
You can find close all tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [12:40]
Dina Temple Raston
If you've never been to DEF con, it's hard to describe how incredibly chaotic it is. It is literally tens of thousands of people sprawling across a massive convention center in Las Vegas. It's a sea of hackers, cybersecurity researchers, government types. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Nina and Jay decided to host a war game. Right away, things didn't go as planned, and it started with the load in or setup day.
- [13:10]
Jay Vogt
So we load in, we find out fairly quickly that the space we thought we were going to have on the DEFCON floor was not the space that.
- [13:21]
Dina Temple Raston
You ended up with.
- [13:23]
Jay Vogt
We needed.
- [13:24]
Dina Temple Raston
Shocker, shocker.
- [13:26]
Jay Vogt
We thought we would have kind of a private space that would curtain off and we could offer a little more anonymity to our, to our players, but that's not the way it turned out.
- [13:38]
Dina Temple Raston
Instead of a semi private space, they were dropped right into the chaos.
- [13:43]
Jay Vogt
We're in this giant Las Vegas convention center, which is home to, you know, every vehicle, sports expo, boat expo, right? These are giant stadium sized rooms. So we were right in the middle. We were down there on the floor.
- [13:59]
Dina Temple Raston
Right next to the biohacking village, just a stone's throw from the famous DEF CON tinfoil hat competition.
- [14:06]
Jay Vogt
So the tinfoil hat people were over in lane one.
- [14:09]
Dina Temple Raston
They give you four sheets of tinfoil and you're supposed to build a hat that will shield your subversive thoughts. Make a hat, make a hat, make a hat, make a hat. But you don't just build it, you actually test it on a mannequin head. There's even a scoring system because this.
- [14:29]
Jay Vogt
Is defcon and it's the sheer amount of sound. And DARPA had this AI thing across the way, and they kept lowering the lights and so we kept complaining and having them raise the lights again. I mean, it was a lot.
- [14:44]
Dina Temple Raston
They took all of this in the din, the crowds, the flashing lights, and.
- [14:48]
Jay Vogt
Then Jay turned to me and he said, we just gotta suck it up and do this.
- [14:55]
Dina Temple Raston
They pulled together two round tables, laid out a giant map of the island, and then a bunch of smaller maps of Taiwan's infrastructure, its power plants, its phone lines.
- [15:06]
Jay Vogt
And Ed McGrady, who had come with us, he was the map designer, and Jay, they were all on the floor there trying to bring the players over and get them oriented.
- [15:17]
Dina Temple Raston
They started setting up the teams.
- [15:20]
Nina Collars
The way the game was set up was they were divided into three teams, usually of like four or five people each. We tried to get mixes of skill sets. Right. So it wasn't just all the threat intel people on one side, and then we put them in the role of the advisors to the Taiwanese government in this game.
- [15:40]
Dina Temple Raston
Everyone was on Team Taiwan. No one would be playing as if they were mainland China. So Nina and Joe briefed the teams.
- [15:48]
Nina Collars
On the basics on the lay of the land in Taiwan in terms of, you know, what does its communications look like, what does its energy and data kind of look like?
- [15:58]
Dina Temple Raston
Then they laid out two attack scenarios. Two different crises.
- [16:03]
Nina Collars
One was cyber attacks, electronic warfare. And then, like, the second scenario was a kinetic one or a conventional strike one where a lot of the stuff that had been sort of cyber attack is now, like, literally getting blown up.
- [16:17]
Dina Temple Raston
Jay laid all this out. And the war games begin, and Ed.
- [16:23]
Jay Vogt
And Jay start going, and they're telling people where to look on the map, and they're telling them, you know, how to submit their moves, and we're adjudicating their moves.
- [16:34]
Dina Temple Raston
They watched, observed, took notes.
- [16:38]
Jay Vogt
You've got the players in the middle and you've got rings of people staring at the people who are playing the game. And there's just a lot of discussion, what is this? And they're rambunctious and they're loud and they're having a good time.
- [16:52]
Dina Temple Raston
Then time was up. A round of thanks, a handshake, a challenge coin, parting gift, military loves challenge coins. It was stamped with a Formosan bear on one side and a plum blossom on the other. Symbols of resilience, symbols of identity. And then everyone just kind of disappeared into the crowd, leaving Nina and Jay to figure out what it all meant and what surprised them the most.
- [17:17]
Jay Vogt
They kept wanting to talk about what is the population doing? What are their habits? How do we prepare them for what's about to happen to them?
- [17:26]
Dina Temple Raston
Why do you think that was?
- [17:28]
Jay Vogt
I think that seasoned veterans of cybersecurity have evolved into an understanding that the technology won't be the answer. It is the tool. But if your population isn't prepared to leverage it, nothing is going to. Nothing's going to get better. It was fascinating.
- [17:48]
Dina Temple Raston
Yeah.
- [17:48]
Jay Vogt
Yeah.
- [17:49]
Dina Temple Raston
As they dug more into the recommendations, they seemed to fall into three main areas. First, a better cyber education. Second, build a hacker core.
- [17:59]
Jay Vogt
And then making choices about what that hacker core would be able to do. Would they be able to stand up their own mesh network? Would they be able to just, you know, reset the wi fi?
- [18:08]
Dina Temple Raston
And finally, the third lesson that was about energy. The players suggested Taiwan lean even harder into going green.
- [18:16]
Jay Vogt
They all wanted to increase resilience by adding solar or wind elements to their power grids to kind of ensure access to energy. But then they, they differed on where they would place assets.
- [18:31]
Dina Temple Raston
Taiwan is covered in mountain ranges.
- [18:34]
Jay Vogt
And so the idea was, well, you know, given that we think there could be jamming and maybe some kinetic missile fires, let's hide everything behind the mountain range on the east side.
- [18:46]
Dina Temple Raston
They were a little surprised by this emphasis on going green because it's unclear.
- [18:52]
Jay Vogt
Yet how these new emerging technologies could or could not be cyber insecure. And so we found that it is an interesting solution.
- [19:00]
Dina Temple Raston
Oh, that's interesting. I bet they didn't think of that. They more just thought we need electricity.
- [19:04]
Jay Vogt
I think that's right.
- [19:05]
Dina Temple Raston
One of the goals of bringing this game to defcon, as opposed to only consulting government and military people, was to find new ways to engage the private sector. That's one of the key lessons from three years of war in Ukraine, just how vital the private sector can be. And one of the people Nina and Jay could feed their recommendations to is this guy, Greg Rattray.
- [19:28]
Greg Rattray
In Taiwan, we would have the opportunity to pull together most of the major global cybersecurity companies.
- [19:37]
Dina Temple Raston
Greg Rattray used to be the chief information security officer at JPMorgan Chase. He's also a retired Air Force officer. And he's been thinking a lot about how to apply the lessons of Ukraine to Taiwan. And he understands those lessons well because after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, he had an idea. He wanted to bring the private sector together to strengthen Ukraine's cyber defenses. And they called the program the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative, or cdac. CDAC has helped Ukraine both defend against and recover from Russian cyber attacks. And to date, they've funneled about $40 million in voluntary cyber defense assistance from private companies to Ukraine. And now Greg is turning his focus to Taiwan.
- [20:23]
Greg Rattray
The stakes for the Taiwanese and its allies are very high. And therefore even if it, the investments need to be very large in order to both deter that occurring or to be ready if the conflict occurs. There's a lot of work that could be done to make Taiwan stronger.
- [20:42]
Dina Temple Raston
So how would, how would do you approach Taiwan differently than you would see DAC Ukraine?
- [20:47]
Greg Rattray
I mean, the major difference stems from the fact that in Taiwan we would have the opportunity to plan more strategic uplifts, focus more on projects that weren't delivering things to be used tomorrow in face of attacks today.
- [21:08]
Dina Temple Raston
And that's what he wishes could have happened in Ukraine. Instead of scrambling after the invasion, they could have built resilience before the war started and in Taiwan, that's still possible in Taiwan.
- [21:20]
Greg Rattray
If we get in there now, have the relationships, you know, an ongoing coordination process, we will be able to take the resources that are available and do a lot, a lot more to help the Taiwanese.
- [21:36]
Dina Temple Raston
As for Nina and Jay, their next step is to bring the war game directly to Taiwan.
- [21:43]
Jay Vogt
In April, we have been invited to play in Taipei at CyberSec 2025.
- [21:51]
Nina Collars
We'll be playing with, you know, civilians, government, all those types of people.
- [21:56]
Dina Temple Raston
Of course, the hope for Nina and Jay and Greg and everyone else keeping an eye on Taiwan is that these recommendations in case of war never need to be fully realized. But if they do, they these exercises and these conversations and this work could make a big difference. It could get allies thinking, could get the private sector ready before it's too late. Because if this war game proved anything, it's that preparation isn't just a good idea. It's necessary because the world is changing and alliances are shifting regardless of what happens on the.
- [22:33]
Jay Vogt
The kind of great power geopolitical stage, right? No matter how these alignments come or go, small countries have to figure out how to function. And so in that sense, we have to learn from any conflict that's out there. That's how we make our partners and allies more secure and better. And so I think, you know, regardless of whether or not there's daylight between the US Government and the Ukrainians currently, you should learn from all the conflicts.
- [23:02]
Dina Temple Raston
That are out there because the next big conflict might not wait for us to be ready. This is Qlik here.
- [23:24]
Zach Hirsch
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click here, then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to TheRecord Media.
- [23:48]
Dina Temple Raston
Today is Tuesday, March 25th, and here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories of the past week. For years, the European Union has been threatening to rein in big tech, and now it's doing it with a vengeance.
- [24:06]
Nina Collars
Under new rules, Apple must let rival makers of devices like smartwatches and headsets access its tech and operating systems.
- [24:14]
Dina Temple Raston
That means Apple can't keep its ecosystem so tightly locked. And Google, they're being accused of gaming their own search engine.
- [24:22]
Nina Collars
And Alphabet's Google was hit with two charges of breaking landmark EU rolls. The rules here, as regulators are accusing the search giant of preferential treatment in its search and Google Play products.
- [24:35]
Dina Temple Raston
It's all part of the EU's Digital Markets act, passed in 2022, which is now being enforced with real consequences. And US officials, they're not pleased.
- [24:47]
Jay Vogt
As far as I'm concerned, it's a form of taxation.
- [24:50]
Greg Rattray
So we have some very big complaints with the eu.
- [24:54]
Dina Temple Raston
Last month, the Trump administration warned that if American firms remain targets of EU regulation, there could be retaliation. Oleg Gordievsky passed away last week at the age of 86. He may be the world's most famous double agent. The son of two kids KGB officers, he was the perfect recruit for the Soviet Union. Until he wasn't.
- [25:18]
Nina Collars
Yevsky, former head of the KGB in London, who started collaborating with British intelligence in 1974, he was by the early 80s, the most prized double agent working for the British.
- [25:31]
Dina Temple Raston
He supplied vital intel, flipped Soviet spies, and played a huge role in the Cold War. Then he disappeared into the trunk of a car to Finland and eventually the UK Officials said. Gordievsky died peacefully in his home in Sussex of natural causes. And finally, last week, the Trump administration released more than 2,000 files tied to the JFK assassination. But it wasn't the content that made the headlines.
- [26:01]
Jay Vogt
Some serious security concerns over the newly released JFK files and real anger after Social Security numbers and other private information of more than 200 people were made public on Tuesday.
- [26:15]
Dina Temple Raston
One of Those affected, Joseph DiGenova. He's a former DOJ official, former Trump campaign lawyer, and former intelligence watchdog. Back in the 1970s, Digenova was involved in the Church Committee, which investigated the misdeeds of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Now he says he's taking legal action, suing the National Archives for doxxing him.
- [26:54]
Morgan Sung
Today's episode was produced by Zach Hirsch, Megan Dietre, Erica Gaeda, Sean Powers, and Dina Temple Raston. It was edited by Karen Duffin, Fact Checked by Darren Ankrum and contains original music by Ben Levingston with some other music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Martin Peralta is our sound designer and engineer. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Tune in on Friday for Mic Drop, which features our favorite interview of the week. We'll have a new episode of Click Here on Tuesday. We'll see you then.
- [27:46]
Zach Hirsch
If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, the Record and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.