This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.

Now I have great current information. Let me craft an engaging narrative script from Ting's perspective that incorporates these details without citations in the response and keeps it under 500 words while maintaining the authentic expert personality.

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Hey listeners, it's Ting here, and boy do we have a doozy to talk about today. Buckle up because the folks at CISA, NSA, and the Canadian Cyber Centre just dropped something absolutely spicy on Thursday, and honestly, it's the kind of thing that should keep infrastructure teams up at night.

Let me set the scene. We're talking about BRICKSTORM, a sophisticated backdoor malware that Chinese state-sponsored actors have been deploying against government and IT sector organizations across the US and Canada. This isn't some script-kiddie nonsense either. These actors are targeting the crown jewels: VMware vSphere platforms and Windows environments, embedding themselves for what looks like permanent residency in victim networks.

Here's where it gets technically delicious. BRICKSTORM is basically the definition of stealth. The malware layers encryption like a paranoid millennial putting on makeup—we're talking HTTPS, WebSockets, nested TLS, and DNS-over-HTTPS all stacked together. The attackers literally make their command-and-control traffic look like legitimate web server behavior. It's fancy stuff. Once they're in, the malware gives them interactive shell access, file browsing capabilities, and even includes a SOCKS proxy for lateral movement throughout the network. Think of it as an all-access backstage pass to your entire infrastructure.

But here's how these actors actually get through the door in the first place. According to threat intelligence from groups tracking this activity, including those monitoring clusters UNC3886 and UNC5221, the attackers are exploiting Ivanti vulnerabilities to gain initial access, then moving laterally to vCenter servers. From there, they're doing some seriously sneaky stuff like cloning domain controller virtual machines to extract Active Directory credentials. They're even creating hidden rogue VMs that they spin up, use, and then shut down to avoid detection. It's operational security theater at its finest.

The attribution evidence is pretty solid too. CrowdStrike has tracked the activity to a group they call Warp Panda, which shows extensive knowledge of cloud environments, Microsoft Azure, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange. These actors clearly know what they're after and they're patient. In some cases, they maintained access since late 2023, which means we're potentially looking at multi-year intelligence collection operations here.

Now for the defensive moves. CISA and NSA have released YARA and SIGMA detection rules to help network defenders scan their environments. The recommendations include updating VMware vSphere servers, implementing network segmentation so the DMZ can't freely communicate with internal systems, disabling RDP and SMB between zones, blocking unauthorized DNS-over-HTTPS providers, and maintaining tight inventory of network edge devices. It's basically cybersecurity housekeeping, but critical housekeeping.

Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala at CISA put it perfectly when she said these state-sponsored actors aren't just infiltrating networks—they're embedding themselves to enable long-term access, disruption, and potential sabotage. That's the real lesson here. This isn't one-off espionage. This is strategic positioning.

Thanks so much for tuning in, listeners. Make sure to subscribe for more deep dives into the cybersecurity landscape. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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