Top education officials for 34 states and Washington, D.C., were warned today by a watchdog group that school districts’ computers could be compromised by malware implanted by Chinese government hacking networks, National Review has learned.
The warning from Parents Defending Education comes on the heels of a hearing last week in the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, where top national-security officials examined the “CCP’s cyber threat to the American homeland.”
During the hearing, FBI director Christopher Wray warned that Chinese government hackers are targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. His comments came as the FBI revealed that it had disrupted a network of internet routers infiltrated by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as “Volt Typhoon.”
In a letter today to the state education officials, Parents Defending Education warned that the schools in their jurisdictions could be at risk, and that school districts with extensive ties to Chinese government actors face a heightened threat. The group cited its own previous findings that 143 K–12 schools across America had entered into partnerships with Hanban, a Chinese-government-backed group that operates “Confucius Classroom” programs in the U.S. The letter went to officials in states where PDE identified these Confucius Classroom partnerships.
“Parents deserve to know if an adversarial foreign nation has access to their child’s school data,” Alex Nester, PDE’s investigative fellow, wrote in the letter to the education officials. PDE also urged the officials to investigate the possibility that Chinese government actors have implanted malware in schools.
Chinese diplomats have conducted direct outreach to at least one of the letter’s recipients in the past. One of them, Sydnee Dickson, the Utah State Board of Education’s superintendent of public instruction, turned down a Chinese embassy invite in 2021 to attend a propaganda webinar about Beijing’s atrocities against Uyghurs. She and other state officials held a video conference call with a Chinese official in the embassy’s education section later that year.
Amid an intensifying reckoning about Beijing’s influence in America’s education system, some states, including Utah and Florida, have acted in recent years to restrict foreign funding in state education.
Still, Nester told NR that “state leaders continue to have their heads in the sand.”
“Our report only scratched the surface of the problem. It’s unclear if student or district data was compromised as part of these connections. We do know in at least one case the Chinese government vetted a teacher sent to the U.S. to teach in American schools. Was this teacher required to share information with the Chinese government?”