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

Listeners, Ting here—armed with a keyboard and way too many two-factor codes! The past few days in US-China cyberworld have been anything but boring. If you love the high-stakes chess match between superpowers, buckle up.

Let’s hit the ground running: US cybersecurity is feeling the squeeze, and not just from Chinese hackers with names like Storm-2603 and Salt Typhoon, but also from Congress itself. Thanks to a federal shutdown and the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 expiring, information highways between government and private sector have sprouted potholes the size of Ohio. According to the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, these gaps could create massive security “blind spots.” And boy, did attackers notice. In 2025 alone, cyberattacks hammered state and local governments in at least 44 states, with the manufacturing sector getting 26% of those nastygrams.

While DC is playing shutdown games, Beijing is playing to win. Chinese cyber espionage jumped a whopping 150% last year, as CrowdStrike and others report. Salt Typhoon, a PRC-linked actor, even slithered through the networks of major US telecoms and a Massachusetts power utility, holding the digital door open for months. Eerie reminder: An adversary in your grid could flip the lights out or worse during real-world crises, especially in the Indo-Pacific.

So how’s Team USA adapting? With Congress snoozing, private sector giants and critical infrastructure providers—think power, transport, and finance—are forced back to cyber basics. That means reviewing log-on banners, privacy notices, and who gets to share what, with whom, and how. Lose a legal shield for info sharing, and suddenly everyone’s nervous about talking. Old-school, maybe, but necessary.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has piled on new restrictions aimed at foreign data brokers, especially those tied to China. If you’re selling or moving data in the US, better double-check the country-of-origin—and your corporate Christmas list. But this race isn’t just about defense. The US and China are locked in a battle of norms: who sets the rules for things like military AI? The State Department is still rallying allies to sign declarations for responsible use of AI in the military, aiming to shape global standards, even as President Xi Jinping pitches the idea of a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization based—where else?—Shanghai. The US, of course, would rather keep AI rules as domestic as apple pie.

On the tech front, defenders are scrambling to plug grid vulnerabilities. NSA and private sector experts hammered the theme at a California industry forum: utilities must treat Chinese exploits as a permanent condition. Think red-teaming, supply chain audits, and resilience drills, focused not just on firewalls but on keeping the power on when—not if—the next big breach hits.

So, to all my fellow cyber-sleuths, the landscape right now is high-risk, high-stakes, with both governments and the private sector catching up while adversaries adapt fast. Stay aware, patch like there’s no tomorrow, and never trust a router that smells faintly like hotpot.

Thanks for tuning in—remember to subscribe for your weekly CyberPulse. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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