This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here on Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, your favorite cyber sage popping the firewall on this week’s wild ride in Chinese cyber operations targeting US security. Spoiler alert: Beijing’s playbook just got stickier and sneakier, and it’s not just another script kiddie story—this is the stuff of real spies, edge-device kung fu, and zero-day dramas.

Let’s dive straight into the salt of the matter—Salt Typhoon, the espionage unit that makes “persistence” look boring. Salt Typhoon is aligned with the Ministry of State Security and has spent the last year ramping up attacks against US telecoms including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and allied networks. Their specialty? Exploiting the no-man’s-land known as network edge devices—routers, VPN gateways, and firewalls. They harvest call detail records, lawful intercept logs, and credentials in bulk. You think your metadata is safe? Not with these guys prowling Cisco and Fortinet vulnerabilities. What’s mind-blowing is their “industrialized” infrastructure. Salt Typhoon registers fake US identities, snags legit SSL certificates from big names like GoDaddy, and runs a maze of DNS clusters. You spot their campaign by tracking shady ProtonMail accounts out of Miami, or by following repeat name server activity.

Tactically, they use firmware implants and bespoke malware—no payloads landing on your endpoint, it’s the hardware that gets hijacked. Recent attribution efforts even finger Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, indicted and sanctioned for brokering stolen data and running the tech behind those implants through front firms like i-SOON and Sichuan Juxinhe. It’s MSS outsourcing at scale, and it means the US has to rethink supply chain security, not just endpoint defense.

Now, switch to another flavor with Phantom Taurus—a new APT defined by Palo Alto Networks. Phantom Taurus spends its days targeting US and allied government databases, telecoms, and embassies, mostly across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, extracting defense intelligence and diplomatic comms. Their latest campaigns ditch boring old phishing for the shock-and-awe of NET-STAR, a .NET malware suite specifically built for IIS web servers. NET-STAR is nasty: its IIServerCore backdoor runs fileless in RAM, loads payloads, evades detection, and encrypts its trails. Versions AssemblyExecuter V1 and V2 can bypass Windows Antimalware and event tracing, meaning Phantom Taurus can grab operational intelligence—think embassy memos—without tripping alarms.

Strategically, Beijing is playing both defense and offense. On the home front, the Cyberspace Administration’s fresh one-hour reporting rules mean any major breach inside China gets flagged, graded, and reported almost in real time—compare with the US, where critical incident reporting is still a mellow 72-hour affair. Internationally, China leverages front companies for deniability, blends living-off-the-land tactics with custom malware to evade attribution, and times its hacks with big political events and US mobilization efforts. This puts critical sectors—telecom, defense, even municipal governments—on red alert.

For defenders, recommendations are clear: Monitor for fake domain registrations and bulk SSLs attached to fabricated identities. Deploy robust firmware validation and anomaly monitoring on edge devices. Harden detection around SQL and IIS server activity—track for suspicious WMI executions and fileless malware. On the strategic front, international collaboration is urgent, especially on intelligence sharing and coordinated threat attribution.

That wraps this week's watch—thanks for tuning in! Subscribe to Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch to keep your firewall hot and your intelligence even hotter. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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