Taiwan entered 2025 under an increasingly intense digital storm. Official reporting showed that government networks were the target of an extraordinary volume of intrusion attempts in 2024, with Taiwan’s National Security Bureau saying the Government Service Network suffered an average of 2.4 million attack attempts per day last year. The NSB framed this surge as part of Beijing’s wider grey zone campaign that pairs military pressure with digital harassment to sap resilience and raise the costs of democratic governance.
The methods behind the numbers matter. Western and industry analysts have documented Chinese state linked operators that prioritize persistent access to communications and infrastructure networks in the Indo Pacific. These groups do not always seek immediate data theft. Instead they build hidden footholds inside routers, firewalls and other edge devices that can be used to deny service or sever links at a politically useful moment. That approach converts cyber espionage into contingency preparation for kinetic coercion and blockade scenarios. The combination of stealthy long‑dwell operations and high volume denial of service campaigns is what makes the current wave distinct from earlier, lower intensity campaigns.
Taipei has responded on multiple tracks that reflect a maturing appreciation of cyber conflict as an integral component of national defense. At the operational level the military has prioritized upgrades to its C4ISR backbone and tactical datalinks to harden command and control and reduce the risk that adversaries can blind decision makers in a crisis. Taipei’s procurement of data link upgrades and related foreign military sales is meant to improve interoperability and create more assured tactical communications across platforms. Those acquisitions matter because resilient command and control buys time and complicates an adversary’s operational calculus.
At the strategic and societal level the government has moved to tighten legal frameworks and broaden resilience beyond uniformed services. High level policy discussions in early 2025 emphasized amendments to national security and cyber statutes, tougher penalties for infiltration, and the need to knit a nationwide protective architecture that covers public and private critical infrastructure alike. Those measures are not solely punitive. They reflect an explicit whole of society posture that treats civilian communications, healthcare and finance systems as frontline assets in any contest for control of Taiwan’s information environment. The aim is to reduce single points of failure and to normalize contingency planning across ministries and companies.
The defense ministry has also explored non kinetic tools to blunt information operations. In mid 2024 the armed forces piloted AI enabled “virtual anchors” during the Han Kuang exercises to extend multilingual strategic communications and rapid public messaging under duress. That experiment signals an acknowledgement that strategic communications are an operational system that must function during degraded conditions if public confidence and societal cohesion are to hold. Hardening networks therefore must go hand in hand with assured messaging systems that remain credible even when adversaries attempt to sow confusion.
These steps reflect prudent choices, but they are not sufficient on their own. Beijing’s pattern of synchronizing cyber activity with military drills shows the intent to multiply effects across domains. Taiwan will need a layered resilience strategy that combines: deeper defense in depth inside critical networks, continuous red teaming by trusted private sector partners, legal measures that make covert influence and supply chain compromises harder, and international cooperation to share indicators and conduct coordinated mitigations. Investments in redundant communications and secure data‑sovereign architectures will reduce the operational leverage that long‑dwell intrusions now give an adversary.
Finally, deterrence in the cyber domain requires clearer signaling and credible consequences. Taipei cannot deter alone. Its investments in secure datalinks, hardened C4ISR, and whole of society resilience create the foundations for a posture that is harder to exploit. To translate that foundation into deterrence Taipei will need budgeted, practical plans to escalate attribution, to expose malign activity internationally, and to coordinate retaliatory or disruptive responses with partners if networks are used to produce material effect in a crisis. The strategic logic is simple. If an adversary expects that prepositioned access will be discovered, exposed, and countered in ways that raise costs, the utility of long dwell intrusions as a tool of coercion is diminished.
The PLA’s cyber pressure is not transient. It is part of a long term campaign to reshape the operational environment around Taiwan and to normalize hybrid tactics that combine force projection with infrastructure manipulation. Taiwan’s upgrades to its cyber defenses, its legal reforms and its efforts to operationalize strategic communications are necessary and politically sensible steps. The challenge now is execution across the private sector and government silos, and the building of international habits of coordination that can turn disruption into a tactical failure for the attacker. Sustained investment and political consensus will determine whether Taiwan can convert today’s urgent upgrades into durable, strategic resilience for the decade ahead.