This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here with your latest Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, so let’s jack straight into what China’s been up to in U.S. networks this week.

According to a new homeland threat assessment from Check Point Software, Chinese state‑aligned operators have fully shifted from smash‑and‑grab spying to long‑term “strategic access” inside critical infrastructure – think power grid control systems, telecom backbones, water plants, and federal networks. Check Point’s data shows roughly a third of nation‑state incidents against U.S. critical infrastructure now hit the energy sector, mostly for deep infiltration of ICS and SCADA, not immediate outages. That’s Beijing treating your substations like a dormant weapons cache.

CISA leadership is saying the quiet part out loud. In a recent briefing reported by the Chosun Ilbo’s business desk, CISA officials warned that Chinese malware is already embedded across U.S. water systems, power grids, telecom, cloud, and identity platforms as part of a “pre‑positioning” strategy aimed at 2027 and a potential Taiwan crisis. The plan, as CISA describes it, is to delay U.S. force mobilization and generate social chaos on demand by flipping those latent accesses into real‑world disruption.

Zooming in on tradecraft, this week’s telemetry from Check Point and others highlights three favorite Chinese methodologies. First, rapid zero‑day exploitation against internet‑facing appliances. Second, identity abuse in cloud and single sign‑on, where they quietly live off the land under legitimate admin tokens. Third, software and services supply‑chain compromises: from 2024 to mid‑2025, supply‑chain‑driven intrusions into U.S. federal networks jumped over 40 percent, letting Beijing ride one vulnerable platform straight into multiple agencies.

Industry‑wise, industrial manufacturing and business services show the heaviest global attack pressure in November, per Check Point’s monthly stats, but when you overlay China‑linked activity, energy, water, transportation and telecom rise to the top as strategic targets. The Independent and The Washington Post, via Strider Technologies research, are also flagging Chinese‑made solar inverters used by about 85 percent of surveyed U.S. utilities as a hidden choke point: rogue communication modules in those inverters could let an adversary bypass firewalls and physically damage parts of the grid.

On attribution and geopolitics, outlets like Cybernews point out how Chinese espionage group “Salt Typhoon” compromised at least nine U.S. telecoms in late 2024, stealing sensitive communications and allegedly staging for potential infrastructure paralysis. Yet, according to Financial Times reporting cited by Cybernews, the current Trump administration is soft‑pedaling sanctions in favor of trade talks and even rolling back some telecom cyber rules, while also green‑lighting exports of high‑end Nvidia H200 AI chips to China. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Atlantic Council both warn that shipping those accelerators to Chinese firms boosts their AI‑enabled cyber capabilities and chips away at U.S. compute advantage.

So what should you, dear defenders, actually do about it? CISA’s answer is: kill the stealth. They’re urging operators to crank up logging and telemetry on cloud, identity, OT, and ICS; aggressively hunt for China‑linked tooling; and adopt secure‑by‑design instead of bolt‑on security. Practically, that means strict network segmentation between IT and OT, mandatory multi‑factor plus phishing‑resistant tokens for admins, continuous monitoring of anomalous inverter and PLC traffic, and hardened firmware and supply‑chain vetting for anything with a Chinese logo in your substations or data centers.

Strategically, U.S. agencies and allies need joint playbooks for pre‑positioned access: coordinated threat intel, tabletop exercises for grid and water disruption, and credible public consequences when groups like Salt Typhoon are pinned on Beijing. Without that, as CSIS experts told Axios, the U.S. looks like a big, slow target with amazing logging and very little deterrence.

I’m Ting, and that’s your Beijing Watch for this week. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next breach.

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