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

Listeners, it’s Ting! If you’ve spent the past week anxiously tracking breaches in US infrastructure, congratulations on surviving the latest episode of Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege. Let’s skip the pleasantries and jump in, because these past few days have been a masterclass in Chinese cyber-ops wizardry—equal parts terrifying and fascinating for cyber nerds like me.

Late last Friday, the Department of Energy—yes, again!—spotted malicious scanning on power grid management networks from IP addresses linked to the threat group APT41, a notorious cyber collective with deep ties to China’s Ministry of State Security. According to cybersecurity teams briefed by CrowdStrike analysts, this campaign used a blend of zero-day privilege escalation exploits and classic spear-phishing, but with a twist: the delivery mechanism bypassed traditional email gates by weaponizing legitimate energy supply chain vendor portals. As one Red Team lead at Forescout Technologies mused, “If the vendors can’t tell friend from foe, neither can you.” Chilling.

Attackers prioritized stealth. They deployed “pre-positioning” malware—basically ghost code that just sits dormant, a tactic increasingly employed by advanced states. Experts like Roy Kamphausen from The National Bureau of Asian Research warn this enables sabotage on demand and is straight out of the Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon playbook. Pre-positioning not only threatens downtime, but also signals that adversaries can flick the off switch for critical systems—think water, power, transport—whenever they choose.

Let’s talk attribution. Forensic evidence pointed directly to salted payloads compiled with Mandarin-language build environments and time stamps aligning with China’s business hours. DefenseOne’s panel of experts, including former DOD advisor Sean Berg, described China as “already in phase three” of the Pacific data war, dominating not by brute force but by knowing exactly when, where, and how to strike for maximum chaos. They weren’t kidding; the attackers also leveraged analytics on bulk-collected employee metadata to simulate legitimate operational traffic—a move only made possible by years of slow, silent exfiltration.

Government response moved fast this time. The Department of War (yes, that’s a new Trump-era name—roll with it), under Austin Dahmer, immediately issued a sector-wide threat directive: inventories of xIoT (that’s “everything Internet of Things,” by the way) endpoints, network traffic segmentation, and rapid rollouts of anomaly-based intrusion detection fed by AI. White House officials openly admitted to exploiting regulatory loopholes to counter China’s tempo—a bit of deregulation to make us nimbler, one staffer winked.

Lessons? Even advanced detection is no substitute for supply chain integrity and interagency drills. Officials emphasized burden-sharing; allies patched in as critical logs showed attempted pivots through Europe and Latin America. My favorite hot take comes from Rob Christian, ex-311th Signal Command, who lamented, “Hiding in the noise isn’t possible anymore. They see you buy snacks at 7-Eleven—literally.”

So, listeners, secure your endpoints, patch that router, and always, always verify who is really behind that vendor login. Thanks for tuning in—don’t forget to subscribe for another slice of cyber truth. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI