This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Welcome back, listeners, to Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch! I’m Ting, your favorite China cyber sleuth—think Sun Tzu meets Silicon Valley with a side of Bilibili memes. Let’s leap right into the digital dragon’s den, because this week has been a firestorm of innovation, infiltration, and international critique coming straight from Beijing’s cyber operatives.

First, the headliner: "Salt Typhoon" is the name echoing down every cyber operations corridor. According to a new multinational technical report involving the FBI, NSA, and intelligence partners from the UK, Australia, Japan, and beyond, China’s Ministry of State Security recruited three legitimate private companies—Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong, Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie, and Sichuan Juxinhe—to launch what might be the boldest cyber operation yet. They successfully broke into giant U.S. telecoms like AT&T and Verizon, granting China eyes and ears on not just government officials but potentially millions of D.C. area cell users. Picture Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns, National Guard units, even military logistics networks—Salt Typhoon’s fingerprints are everywhere. It’s no longer about anonymous malware hidden in the shadows; it’s about full-featured Chinese firms operating as spies for hire, and analysts at SentinelOne are shaking their heads at just how brazen this outsourcing has become.

But Salt Typhoon didn’t stop at phone records. Their methods went low and slow—living off the land, using legitimate routers and vendor hardware, making the attacks nearly invisible. Gloria Glaubman, a former Senior Cyber Advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, says this trend of using normal enterprise gear, rather than wild, custom malware, ups the detection difficulty by an order of magnitude. So when you’re patching your network this weekend, think twice—because that firmware update could be the spy.

Meanwhile, the spear-phishing scene is getting its own Chinese flavor. Just this month, hackers linked to China impersonated none other than Representative John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition with the CCP, sending out emails to law firms, think tanks, and foreign diplomats. It’s not about busting through firewalls; it’s about exploiting American routine, trust, and bureaucracy. The lesson: Trust, but definitely verify—even if the “Congressional request” drops during your fourth Zoom call.

Internationally, the U.S. is firing back with policy. Senators Cortez Masto and Ted Budd introduced the China Military Power Transparency Act to mandate expanded, annual Pentagon reviews of Chinese cyber and biotech capabilities right through 2030. The goal? Never let the dragon’s tail sweep under the radar, especially when the People’s Liberation Army might deploy cyber to disrupt American infrastructure during a conflict.

So what’s the action plan? U.S. companies need to up their detection game—now. The reauthorization of landmark info-sharing laws like CISA is critical. If corporations don’t have clear legal permission and incentives to swap threat data with government, attackers like Salt Typhoon will stay concealed. Executive and legal councils should drill governance, not just buy more tech—because your weakest link could be a hurried staffer or an insecure boardroom process, not just a zero-day exploit.

Strategically, the U.S. must shift from “spot the bad code” to “know your supply chain, verify your vendors, and treat every digital handshake with a dose of skepticism.” Proactive threat hunting, regular multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection, and—sorry, there’s no short cut—boring old patching.

Next week, we’ll be watching for more on the AI-powered influence ops driven by GoLaxy and the underground ID racket out of Xiamen, which, trust me, gets even weirder.

Thanks for tuning in! Subscribe to stay ahead in the world’s wildest cyber rivalry. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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