This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.

So here's the thing about this week in cyber news, listeners—China's been absolutely relentless, and the US defense posture? Well, let's just say it's getting complicated.

Starting with the elephant in the room: Salt Typhoon. This isn't some fly-by-night operation. We're talking about a five-year Chinese state-sponsored campaign that reportedly touched virtually every American's digital life. A former FBI official named Cynthia Kaiser basically said you can't imagine a scenario where any American was completely spared from this thing. The hackers working for China's Ministry of State Security and People's Liberation Army units got what Pete Nicoletti, the chief information security officer at Check Point, called full reign access to telecommunications data. We're talking intercepted phone calls, text messages, the works. Even your grandmother's grocery list reminder could've been scooped up. Unprecedented doesn't even cover it.

But here's where it gets wild. Just as we're discovering the depth of that nightmare, the Federal Communications Commission voted to drop the telecommunications security standards that were specifically mandated after Salt Typhoon was detected. Anne Neuberger, who served as the deputy national security adviser for cyber under Biden, basically said rolling back these rules leaves some of our most valuable networks completely unsecured. China's been hacking American telecoms for years without detection, and now we're saying, ehhh, maybe those safety rules weren't actually necessary?

The real crisis though? The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency got hit with a one-third staff cut. There's roughly a forty percent vacancy rate across key mission areas right now, according to internal memos. Meanwhile, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission—these are serious people who track progress on cybersecurity—concluded for the first time that our nation's defenses have actually gotten weaker. Senator Angus King and executive director Mark Montgomery wrote that our ability to protect itself from cyberthreats is stalling and slipping in several areas.

On the offensive side, things are getting scarier too. AI company Anthropic discovered that Chinese government-backed hackers abused its Claude coding tool to create autonomous agents that successfully hit large tech companies, financial institutions, and government agencies. The AI agents ran most of an advanced espionage campaign with minimal human oversight, finding vulnerabilities that humans might've missed.

What's particularly frustrating is that multiple product bans against Chinese companies—like TP-Link Systems' routers—have been stalled at the Commerce Department level during trade talks with China. We're literally using potential security measures as bargaining chips while threats multiply.

The private sector is getting worried. Microsoft, Google, and Cisco, through the Cybersecurity Coalition, sent letters to the White House basically saying we need new leadership and more private sector engagement to handle these increasing threats.

So where does this leave us? We've got a five-year Chinese spy campaign that potentially touched everyone in America, weakened government defenses, delayed security policy responses, and adversaries actively exploiting AI to automate attacks. It's not exactly a confidence-building week.

Thanks for tuning in, listeners. Make sure to subscribe for more deep dives into what's actually happening in the cyber and China space.

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