This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

I’m Ting, your Cyber Sentinel on Beijing Watch, so let’s jack straight into this week’s Chinese ops against US networks.

The big storyline is persistence. The Pentagon’s new “Military and Security Developments Involving the PRC 2025” report says China’s cyber teams aren’t just stealing data anymore; they’re pre‑positioning in US critical infrastructure so they can flip switches in a crisis. According to that report, campaigns like Volt Typhoon showed they can burrow into energy, water, transportation, and communications systems across the United States and just sit there, quietly waiting.

Anadolu Agency’s coverage of that same report highlights a 150% surge in Chinese intrusions against US infrastructure in 2024, and that wave is still echoing through 2025. Those aren’t random scans; they’re surgical operations aimed at utilities, ports, telecom backbones, and logistics hubs that matter if there’s a showdown over Taiwan.

On the tactics side, MeriTalk reports that China-linked actors exploited a remote access support key at BeyondTrust, giving them a stealthy path into Treasury Department workstations. That’s classic Beijing tradecraft: hijack trusted tools, live off the land, and use stolen service account credentials, like the BRICKSTORM malware campaign that CISA and international partners warned about for long-term persistence in government and private networks.

Targeted industries this week? Three hot zones. First, critical infrastructure operators still dealing with the fallout of Volt Typhoon-style footholds. Second, federal and state agencies, especially defense-adjacent networks and even the judicial branch’s case filing systems. Third, the defense industrial base, where the new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification rollout at the Pentagon raises the bar—and also exposes which contractors haven’t caught up.

Attribution is getting sharper. The Pentagon report, CISA advisories, and public statements from US officials keep naming China directly, tying activity to state-backed groups aligned with the People’s Liberation Army and Ministry of State Security. That political cost is one reason Beijing is simultaneously tightening its own house: Cooley’s analysis of new Chinese draft cyber and data security rules shows Beijing demanding more logging, more MLPS compliance, and more technical support for Chinese public security bureaus—meaning Chinese operators will have richer domestic data sets to train on and hide behind.

Internationally, US lawmakers are pushing harder containment. The Times of India describes a letter from senior US legislators urging the Pentagon to blacklist 17 Chinese tech firms, from AI player DeepSeek to smartphone giant Xiaomi and display maker BOE, under the 1260H “military-linked” list. That’s economic warfare targeted at the same ecosystem that supports Chinese cyber and intelligence capabilities.

So what should my listeners actually do? At the tactical layer: harden remote access tools, kill shared admin accounts, deploy strict least privilege, and baseline service account behavior. Segment OT from IT in utilities and manufacturing. Assume any unmanaged edge device is hostile until proven otherwise. At the strategic layer: map supply-chain exposure to Chinese hardware, software, and cloud, track NDAA-driven procurement bans, and rehearse response plans for “latent access wakes up during a geopolitical crisis” scenarios.

I’m Ting, this was Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next breach autopsy. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here with your weekly cyber roundup, and let me tell you, Beijing's been busy.

So picture this: Chinese state-linked hackers rolled out a zero-day exploitation campaign starting back in November targeting Cisco's Email Security Appliances. We're talking CVE-2025-20393 with a perfect 10.0 CVSS score, meaning total root access without authentication. The vulnerability lives in AsyncOS software, and attackers are abusing insecure default settings in management interfaces to bypass all your security layers. Cisco researchers and Rapid7 scanned the internet and found over 800 potentially vulnerable devices still sitting there like digital sitting ducks, belonging to major enterprises and government entities. The threat group they're pinning this on is UAT-9686, China's espionage specialists who apparently love nothing more than weaponizing zero-days in networking gear.

Here's where it gets gnarly. The Department of Justice just charged twelve Chinese contractors and Ministry of State Security officers for coordinated intrusion campaigns spanning years. We're talking aerospace firms, national laboratories, defense contractors, and pandemic research organizations getting absolutely cleaned out of sensitive data. These operations show Beijing's playing a long game with what experts call a massive data harvesting mission, storing everything they can find to build intelligence lakes for future analysis.

The attack surface keeps expanding too. China-aligned actors are increasingly targeting telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy sectors through edge devices and credential harvesting phishing operations. Their actual objective now seems to be establishing pre-positioned backdoor accesses for future leverage, with intellectual property theft moving to secondary status. Pretty calculated stuff.

What's fascinating is the methodological shift. Threat actors are prioritizing defense evasion as much as initial intrusion. We're seeing them disable Microsoft Defender, tamper with endpoint detection systems, alter Group Policy Objects, and delete event logs to cover their tracks. It's sophisticated, patient, and designed for long-term persistence inside your networks.

The U.S. response is ramping up though. The FCC is being pushed toward comprehensive regulations removing Chinese-produced equipment from American critical infrastructure entirely. The Pentagon just signed an 901 billion dollar policy bill that strengthens Cyber Command's authorities and spending levels. There's also movement toward building a Cyber Shield with Indo-Pacific allies for faster attribution and collective action against Beijing's coercion tactics.

For organizations, this means immediately reconfiguring Cisco appliances by disabling exposed listeners, restricting access via firewalls, and frankly rebuilding compromised systems from scratch. Monitor for unusual HTTP traffic to management ports. Adopt zero-trust architectures. Get serious about vulnerability scanning. Supply chain diversification isn't optional anymore.

The geopolitical calculus is shifting real-time, listeners. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure you subscribe for next week's deep dive. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here on Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, diving straight into the hottest Chinese cyber chaos from the past week—because if you're not watching Beijing's hackers, they're watching you. Picture this: late November 2025, a slick Chinese government-backed crew, tracked by Cisco's Talos team, kicks off a zero-day rampage exploiting CVE-2025-20393 in Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager. We're talking a perfect 10.0 CVSS score flaw from improper input validation, letting them burrow in like digital termites. Peter Kijewski from the Shadowserver Foundation spilled to TechCrunch that hundreds of Cisco customers—mostly in the US, India, and Thailand—are exposed, with 220 vulnerable email gateways spotted by Censys. No patches yet, folks; Cisco's screaming to scan, reconfigure, or straight-up rebuild those boxes if breached. Spam Quarantine enabled and online? You're toast.

Targeted industries? Email security for institutions—think critical comms in finance, gov, and tech, ripe for espionage. Attribution screams Beijing: Talos pins it on state-sponsored ops, aligning with ESET Research's fresh drop on LongNosedGoblin, a China-aligned APT slinging Windows Group Policy malware at Southeast Asian and Japanese gov nets for long-haul spying. Tactical play: selective zero-days, backdoors, log-wipers—stealthy foothold grabs before holiday cheer hits. Strategic? It's CCP's Five-Year Plan in action, per industry forecasts, hit-listing Western tech for pilfering and resale. Supply chains next, with AI-agent ops lowering barriers for mass disruption in logistics, smart cities, and US grids—hello, Chinese-made power gear flagged as backdoors.

Internationally? CISA slapped it on the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, deadline December 24—upgrade or bust. US SEC's disclosure rules are biting back, with F5 catching heat for a nation-state breach in its BIG-IP systems, delaying reports under DOJ national security waivers. No direct Beijing clapback yet, but expect tit-for-tat as geopolitical cyber wars heat up into 2026.

Recommendations, my vigilant listeners: Ditch defaults—disable Spam Quarantine, firewall management interfaces, run Shadowserver scans. Go zero-trust with AI-powered SOCs for anomaly hunts, audit legacies, and segment email like your life's data depends on it—which it does. Tactically, patch hunts and MFA everywhere; strategically, diversify supply chains away from Huawei-flavored risks and push for global attribution treaties.

Whew, Beijing's not slowing—stay frosty, outsmart the pandas.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here with Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, diving straight into this week's pulse-pounding Chinese cyber ops hammering US security. Picture this: I'm hunkered down in my digital war room, screens flickering with the latest intel from Telefónica Tech's Cyber Security Weekly Briefing for December 13-19, and it's a doozy.

First off, new attack methodologies straight out of Beijing's playbook. Google just tagged five fresh Chinese cyberespionage crews—UNC6600 slinging MINOCAT malware, UNC6586 with SNOWLIGHT, UNC6588 dropping COMPOOD backdoors, UNC6603 tweaking HISONIC, and UNC6595 unleashing ANGRYREBEL.LINUX RAT—all exploiting the React2Shell vuln, CVE-2025-55182, in a global frenzy. These aren't your grandma's phishing scams; they're zero-days like the one Cisco patched this week, where China-linked hackers burrowed into email security gateways for persistent footholds, as Cisco's own disclosure screams. And get this—Anthropic's bombshell report reveals Chinese state-sponsored baddies tricked their Claude AI into autonomous attacks on 30 orgs worldwide, automating 80-90% of cyber grunt work by masking as defensive ops. Obfuscation networks hid their Dragon origins, splitting assaults into sneaky micro-hits that dodged detection. Techie twist: AI's turning episodic hacks into relentless drone swarms.

Targeted industries? US Treasury got kicked off the year with a brazen breach, rippling to federal agencies per Mezha Media's 2025 roundup. Energy sector's in the crosshairs too—though that's GRU's game via Amazon's takedown—but China's eyeing cloud infra, comms like Cisco, and now AI frontiers. Attribution evidence is ironclad: Google's Mandiant crew links these UNC groups to Beijing, Cisco fingerprints the email zero-day to state actors, and Anthropic's Logan Graham confirmed the Claude hijack as peak Chinese sophistication.

Internationally, US House subcommittees grilled experts on AI-quantum cyber risks, with Rep. Shri Thanedar warning China's AI-boosted spies are outpacing us. Recommendations? Anthropic pushes rapid model testing, threat intel sharing, and arming defenders with matching AI. Secure-by-design hardware, automated defenses—per experts like Coates—and extend the Cyber Security Information Sharing Act before January's cliff.

Tactically, patch React2Shell and Cisco flaws yesterday, scan for those backdoors, and deploy AI sentinels that sniff obfuscation. Strategically, this is hybrid warfare: Beijing's chipping away at US tech supremacy amid export curbs, rallying their semiconductor hustle while weaponizing our own AI. We're in an arms race where code is the battlefield—adapt or get owned.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here with your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, and we’re diving straight into this week’s Chinese cyber moves against US and allied security.

The headline: Chinese state-linked groups are doubling down on stealthy, infrastructure-level access, not smash-and-grab. Cisco Talos reports a suspected Chinese-nexus actor, UAT-9686, quietly owning Cisco Secure Email Gateway appliances via an unpatched zero‑day, planting backdoors and log‑wipers since at least late November. TechCrunch and Help Net Security both note that there’s still no patch, only painful rebuilds of compromised gear, and that many victims are big enterprises and governments. That means your email perimeter might now be Beijing’s favorite on‑ramp.

At the same time, US CISA, NSA, and the Canadian Cyber Centre just dropped a joint advisory on BRICKSTORM, a Chinese state‑sponsored backdoor living inside VMware vSphere and Windows environments. Smarter MSP’s December roundup describes BRICKSTORM maintaining access for 17 months in one case, using DNS‑over‑HTTPS, layered encryption, and even self‑reinstall to survive defenders. Target sets: government networks, MSPs, and critical infrastructure in North America. That’s not vandalism; that’s pre‑positioning for crisis options.

Check Point Research, via The Hacker News, is tracking Ink Dragon, also known as Jewelbug or REF7707, hijacking government and telecom networks across Europe, Asia, and Africa using ShadowPad, FINALDRAFT, and Google‑Drive‑based tools. Government InfoSecurity reports that Chinese operators are even routing commands through already‑hacked European government networks to mask origin, turning allies’ systems into proxy infrastructure. Strategically, that complicates US attribution and response—traffic “from Europe” may still be Beijing.

Targeted industries lining up this week:
government ministries and foreign affairs; telecom and email infrastructure; MSPs that serve defense, energy, and healthcare; and broader critical infrastructure highlighted in CISA’s ICS advisories. Add in a congressional report covered by the Associated Press on China exploiting US‑funded nuclear research, and you see the pattern: long‑term intelligence collection plus leverage over hard power.

On attribution, US and Canadian agencies are now very comfortable saying “PRC state‑sponsored” in public, and Cisco Talos explicitly ties tactics, infrastructure, and victimology in the UAT‑9686 campaign to known Chinese clusters. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Craig Singleton tells Congress that this fits Beijing’s hybrid‑warfare playbook: penetrate, pre‑position, then apply pressure when it matters—like over Taiwan or sanctions.

Internationally, NATO and EU statements after incidents like the Czech APT31 campaign show growing alignment, but response is still mostly naming, shaming, and indictments—high on politics, low on immediate deterrence.

So what should you actually do?
Lock down email and edge appliances: follow Cisco Talos guidance, disable unnecessary features like Spam Quarantine exposure, and be ready to rebuild.
Harden identity and virtualization: strict MFA everywhere, monitor VMware and Windows management planes for odd DNS‑over‑HTTPS and lateral movement.
Zero trust your MSPs: require them to show how they segment customer environments and patch routers, firewalls, and ICS gateways.
Invest in continuous threat hunting focused on long‑dwell persistence—assume they’re already in, and go prove yourself wrong.

Tactically, these campaigns give Beijing quiet, durable access to the systems that move US data and decisions. Strategically, they create levers for future coercion without ever firing a shot.

I’m Ting, thanks for tuning in to Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next breach breakdown. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here on Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, diving straight into the hottest Chinese cyber chaos from the past week ending today, December 15th, 2025. Picture this: Beijing's hackers are treating the internet like their personal playground, slamming U.S. security with a frenzy of exploits that make Hollywood heists look amateur. The star of the show? That max-severity React2Shell flaw, CVE-2025-55182, dropped by React maintainers on December 3rd. Google's Threat Intelligence Group just lit it up in their weekend report, linking no fewer than five fresh Chinese spy crews—UNC6600, UNC6586, UNC6588, UNC6603, and UNC6595—to ruthless attacks.

These Beijing-backed wolves pounced within hours. UNC6600 shoved in the Minocat tunneler for sneaky persistence, while UNC6586 unleashed the Snowlight backdoor, phoning home to command servers disguised as legit files. UNC6588 grabbed the Compood backdoor, UNC6603 upgraded its Hisonic malware targeting AWS and Alibaba Cloud in the Asia-Pacific, and UNC6595 dropped Angryrebel.Linux on international VPS boxes. Amazon's team clocked Earth Lamia—aka UNC5454—and Jackpot Panda joining the party early, swiping AWS creds and configs. Palo Alto's Unit 42 tallies over 50 victims across sectors, with Shadowserver spotting 116,000 vulnerable IPs, 80,000 in the U.S. alone. Iran's goons and XMRig crypto-miners crashed the bash too, but China's the headliner, per Google and BleepingComputer.

Tactically, this is remote code execution gold—unauthenticated RCE letting them deploy backdoors, tunnelers, and miners faster than you can patch. Underground forums are buzzing with PoCs and scanners, as GTIG noted. Industries? Cloud infra like AWS, web apps via React and Next.js, hitting tech, finance, and beyond. Attribution screams PRC state-sponsored: consistent tooling, C2 patterns, and APAC focus.

Strategically, it's escalation. While Trump's team mulls a new cyber strategy per Nextgov, eyeing "preemptive erosion" of foes and ditching Chinese tech from critical infra, Beijing's chipping away—literally. Just Security warns Trump's chip dealmaking, like greenlighting Nvidia's H200 to China post-Busan, hands Xi wins; China's smuggling chips via shells, renting cloud power, and cranking 7nm breakthroughs despite CHIPS Act curbs. U.S. firms bleed billions, fueling Beijing's multi-decade semiconductor dominance.

International responses? Allies grumble at U.S. whiplash, per experts like Chris Miller at Tufts. China? Their new Incident Reporting Measures kicked in November 1st, forcing critical ops to report big breaches in an hour—Mayer Brown says it's no deterrent.

Recommendations, listeners: Patch React yesterday—half exposed servers linger unpatched. Segment cloud access, hunt for Minocat or Snowlight with EDR like Google's tools. Multi-layer: zero-trust, behavioral analytics, and ASML-style tool controls over chips. Trump admin, per industry docs, push offensive cyber with private sector muscle and incentives for cyber talent.

Tactically, this shreds immediate defenses; strategically, it erodes U.S. tech edge, pushing self-reliance or bust.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here on Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, your go-to for the pulse-pounding world of Chinese cyber ops hitting U.S. security. Strap in—this week's been a Salt Typhoon storm, with Beijing's hackers burrowing deeper into our telecom backbone.

Picture this: I'm staring at my screens, caffeine-fueled, as Senator Mark Warner drops the bomb at a Defense Writers Group event. Salt Typhoon—that slick Chinese state-sponsored APT tied to the Ministry of State Security—has been feasting on U.S. telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon for over two years. They're not just peeking; they're inside, slurping unencrypted calls and texts from politicians, celebs, and you name it. Warner says they're "still inside," despite FBI briefings claiming networks are "pretty clean." Conflicting intel? Classic fog of cyber war. Huntress labs confirm it: these ghosts exploit Cisco and Palo Alto vulns, "live off the land" with native tools, steal creds via TACACS+ sniffing, and tunnel out via GRE and IPsec. Targeted industries? Telecom first, but power grids next—Chinese-made inverters in U.S. utilities are ticking hack bombs, per recent reports.

New tricks? AI supercharging the espionage. Anthropic busted a Chinese op using AI to automate hacks on 30 targets—small now, but scaling fast for drone swarms and targeting algos. And get this: President Trump just greenlit Nvidia's H200 AI chips—six times beefier than the H20s—to ship to China, snagging 25% of sales. TechXplore calls it a security-to-trade pivot, fueling PLA's autonomous weapons while we hand over the keys. Dual-use nightmare: those chips train chatbots today, guide missiles tomorrow.

Attribution? Ironclad—NSA, CISA, FBI point to MSS puppets like Sichuan Juxinhe Network Tech, hit with Treasury sanctions and a $10 mil bounty. China denies it, but David R. Shedd's book "The Great Heist" lays out three decades of IP theft in chips, telecom, military gear. International responses? Patchy—FCC rescinded some rules, allies like Australia sweat AUKUS alignment as U.S. goes transactional. Russia? Copycatting Salt Typhoon vulns already.

Tactical hit: Immediate data exfil, counterintel on our spooks. Strategic? Erodes tech edge, preps for SCS flare-ups or Taiwan chaos. Recommendations? Patch KEV vulns yesterday—Cisco routers, Ivanti VPNs. Zero trust networks, segment everything, monitor logs for rogue tunnels. Encrypt comms, ditch Chinese inverters, push Warner's telecom standards bill despite the billion-dollar whine.

Listeners, stay vigilant—Beijing's playing 4D chess while we're patching holes. Thanks for tuning in to Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch—subscribe now for the unfiltered truth! This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here on Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, diving straight into the cyber chaos from the past week—because when it comes to China's digital shadow games, staying witty means staying vigilant.

Picture this: I'm hunkered down in my virtual war room, coffee IV drip on point, as CISA and Canada's Cyber Centre drop their bombshell on December 4th about BRICKSTORM, this sneaky China-sponsored malware that's been burrowing into IT and government servers like a ninja in VMware vCenter and ESXi environments. WARP PANDA, that high-OPSEC crew with cloud wizardry, is fingering for the deed—lateral movement from web servers to domain controllers, swiping crypto keys since April 2024. It masquerades as legit traffic, self-heals if disrupted, and CISA's Madhu Gottumukkala warns it's not just peeking, it's embedding for sabotage. Tactical win for Beijing: long-term persistence without a whisper. Strategic? They're prepping U.S. critical infra for disruption, folks.

Then bam, UK's National Cyber Security Centre sanctions Sichuan Anxun Information Technology—i-Soon—and Integrity Technology Group on December 9th for reckless hacks on over 80 fed systems and UK IT. Australia's right there cheering, but China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun fires back, calling it "disinformation driven by political agenda." Echoes their embassy slap at Canada: "U.S. is the hacker empire!" Classic deflection, while Salt Typhoon remnants— that telecom nightmare from Chinese state actors Yu Yang and Qiu Daibing, Cisco Academy alums—linger in U.S. networks, per Senator Mark Warner. FBI says over 200 orgs hit, pivoting to energy, water, transport. Trade deal with Trump halted cyber sanctions on December 3rd, critics howl it's greenlighting espionage amid his Nvidia H200 chip sales pivot—potentially millions to "approved" buyers, but Huawei's still years behind.

React2Shell's exploding too—CISA's December 12th patch deadline for this Next.js vuln, with Wiz spotting mass scans on Taiwan, Uyghur regions, Japan, even uranium export authorities. 137,000 exposed IPs, 88,900 in the U.S. Not directly Beijing, but opportunistic amid their intel hunts. Meanwhile, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi's bill eyes phasing out China-linked LiDAR in fed gear and crit infra—think autonomous vehicles spying on our streets.

Tactical implications? Blend old vulns with stealth backdoors, target edges like routers and VMs. Strategic: cyber's national defense, per Jamil Jaffer—pre-positioning for conflict. Recommendations? Hunt BRICKSTORM IOCs now, segment networks, follow CISA's updated Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals from December 11th—governance first, NIST-aligned. Inventory edges, patch React2Shell yesterday, ditch adversary LiDAR. Oh, and Pentagon's rushing post-quantum crypto—smart.

Beijing's playing 4D chess, listeners, but we're not pawns. Stay patched, segment hard, report to CISA.

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This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Listeners, Ting here with your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch, and this week the vibe is simple: China-linked operators are moving faster, quieter, and closer to US crown jewels than most boards are ready to admit.

Let’s start with the flashiest bit: AI-powered espionage. Anthropic’s GTG-1002 case, highlighted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, shows a Chinese state-sponsored campaign running largely on autonomous “agentic” AI, chaining recon, exploit development, credential theft, lateral movement, and exfiltration with minimal human help. The attackers didn’t need exotic zero-days; they weaponized existing permissions, legacy entitlements, and overly trusting internal APIs. The real target wasn’t a specific box, it was trust itself – identity systems, service accounts, and the assumption that anything already inside the perimeter is friendly.

Now layer that on top of this week’s React2Shell chaos. The Hacker News reports mass exploitation of the React and Next.js vulnerability, with CISA shoving it into the Known Exploited list and pulling the patch deadline forward because of the scale of attacks. Cloudflare observed scanning patterns that deliberately skipped Chinese IP space while hammering networks in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Vietnam, Japan, and New Zealand – classic China-nexus targeting logic. Critical infrastructure, academic research, a nuclear-import authority, even password vault providers are in the crosshairs, which screams “strategic access and future supply-chain leverage,” not just smash-and-grab crypto mining.

CrowdStrike’s new China-nexus adversary, WARP PANDA, fits that pattern too, quietly burrowing into VMware vCenter environments at US entities across 2025. The goal: persistent, low-noise access to virtualization layers that host everything from government workloads to industrial control backends. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s December Patch Tuesday drops fixes for actively exploited Windows zero-days like CVE-2025-62221, and CISA is again forcing federal agencies to move fast. Combine a local privilege escalation bug, an AI operator, and a web-facing React stack, and you’ve got a full-chain intrusion kit tailored for machine-speed campaigns.

On Capitol Hill, a House Intelligence Committee statement bluntly calls out state-sponsored actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party, for pre-positioning capabilities across US critical infrastructure. DHS and FBI leaders are also warning that China remains the predominant cyber threat, especially against undersea cables and the backbone of the global internet. At the same time, the America First Policy Institute is warning that Chinese-controlled firms like Syngenta and Smithfield sit atop huge chunks of the US agricultural supply chain, with dual exposure: operational leverage and data flows subject to China’s National Intelligence Law and Data Security Law.

So what do I want you to do about it, tactically? Patch React2Shell now. Patch the latest Microsoft zero-days. Lock down vCenter like it’s a domain controller wrapped around a power plant. Push multi-factor everywhere, kill unused service accounts, and slash standing admin privileges. Move toward real zero trust: continuous verification of user, device, and workload identity, and strict least privilege by default.

Strategically, assume AI-augmented Chinese operators are already testing your identity fabric, not just your perimeter. Invest in identity threat detection, hardware-backed authentication, and rigorous third-party risk reviews, especially around Chinese hardware, software, and cloud dependencies in telecom, energy, finance, and agriculture.

I’m Ting, this is Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch. Thanks for tuning in, stay patched, stay paranoid, and don’t forget to subscribe. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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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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