Wray said the country has “a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations—big or small—combined.”
Someone in IT security explained to me once that in the US the government usually pays far less than private sector jobs, so they don’t have a very good pool of applicants who want to “serve”. They usually leverage cyber criminals’ punishment by making them work for the FBI and the like. Maybe the Chinese government pays well?
It’s not a very useful ratio in general. There are four times as many Chinese citizens than American to start off with. It’s pretty normal for criminals to outnumber the police. But most importantly is the factor that Chinese hackers do not exclusively target US assets and US cyber assets are not exclusively targeted by Chinese Hackers.
There is probably just no easy way to enumerate the number of combined public and private cyber staff necessary for a country to protect itself form all global cyber threats. This statement is just using a scary number and the name of a geopolitical rival to get funding. The funding is probably in all honesty needed but it’s a shame that the only way they can get it in this climate is through politically charged fear mongering.
I don’t think FBI cyber staff is equivalent. You would want to consider NSA, CIA ect also for it to be an equivalent comparison.
