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

Alright listeners, I'm Ting, and we're diving headfirst into what's been a legitimately wild week in the US-China cyber arena. So grab your coffee because things are heating up faster than a compromised server farm.

Let's start with the elephant in the room. The Salt Typhoon campaign has basically been the cybersecurity equivalent of finding out your house has been occupied for five years and you just noticed the squatters. An FBI veteran just revealed that Salt Typhoon monitored every American for five years, which is absolutely bonkers. We're talking about Chinese state-sponsored actors working with entities like Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology that got sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January 2025. These actors compromised at least 200 companies across 80 countries, and they're still actively operating. Just between December 2024 and January 2025, they targeted over 1,000 unpatched Cisco edge devices globally and infiltrated five additional telecom providers. The sophistication here rivals Russia's SolarWinds operation from 2020, and that's saying something serious.

But here's where it gets interesting on the defensive side. Twenty-three international agencies just coordinated an unprecedented joint cybersecurity advisory. We're talking the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and ten other nations working together. Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel is personally spearheading forensic examinations of compromised devices and mapping out the attack scope. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an AI Cybersecurity Collaboration Playbook in January 2025 to create frameworks for voluntary information sharing between industry leaders and federal agencies on AI-related threats. That's industry and government working in concert, which honestly hasn't always been smooth.

China just dropped another move though. The Ministry of Public Security started soliciting public opinions on newly drafted cybersecurity supervision regulations that give authorities power to conduct vulnerability detection and penetration testing on network facilities. They're essentially codifying their inspection capabilities, which tells us something about where they think this competition is heading.

The private sector isn't sitting idle either. Accenture and Microsoft expanded their co-investment in AI-driven cyber solutions. Mandiant is actively tracking sophisticated campaigns hitting software developers and law firms, with some hackers lurking undetected in corporate networks for over a year. The Treasury Department's OFAC followed through with aggressive sanctions against multiple Chinese entities involved in cyber operations.

Here's my takeaway for listeners: we're in an escalation cycle where both sides are raising their game simultaneously. The US is finally coordinating internationally, funding better defenses, and getting serious about attribution. China is integrating AI into their operations and expanding their regulatory apparatus for cyber supervision. The real battle isn't just about blocking attacks anymore; it's about controlling the narrative and the technology that will define cyber warfare for the next decade.

Thanks for tuning in, listeners. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next update when things inevitably get even more interesting. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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