This is your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert podcast.

This is Ting, your ace pilot on Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert, where we slice through the cyber smoke and spotlight the biggest dragon moves of the past week. Buckle up, listeners—because we are diving straight into the heat.

Let’s kick off with the cyber-escalation ripple that sent a lot of CISOs into coffee-fueled overdrive. According to Security Affairs and echoed by GreyNoise, on October 3rd there was a wild 500% surge in hostile scans targeting Palo Alto Networks login portals—the highest spike in three months. While attribution’s always a shell game, China-linked activity is absolutely on the radar for these credential-stuffing and exploitation attempts. Palo Alto gear is used in everything from banks to universities, so this isn’t just an IT concern, it’s a national resilience play.

Now, if you thought consulting data was safe, think again. Red Hat confirmed a breach of an internal GitLab environment tied to its consulting arm, and responsibility was claimed by the Crimson Collective, a group touting links to previous data raids. They’re boasting about 570GB of stolen content—project docs, code snippets, automation tools—from more than 28,000 private repositories. Screenshots suggest major government agencies and telecoms may be among the affected. According to Red Hat, their core product supply chain wasn’t impacted—good. But threat researchers warn those customer engagement reports could be a goldmine for further China-backed exploitation efforts if the attackers decide to sell or weaponize details about sensitive networks.

If you’re wondering about the strategy behind this constant barrage, ENISA’s 2025 Threat Landscape report offers a masterclass. China-aligned groups are laser-focused on public administration, transport, civil society, and crucial digital infrastructure across Europe. Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, France—they’re all on Beijing’s priority list, especially for cyber espionage. Aviation and maritime sectors, NGOs, and advocacy orgs have all reported increased scanning, phishing, and malware attempts—this paints a picture of long-term reconnaissance with high-value disruption in mind.

On the US side, CISA wasn’t taking naps. Over the past week, they stuffed their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with new flaws, from Samsung and Juniper gateways to classic GNU Bash vulnerabilities, warning all critical sector players to patch immediately. CISA’s stance is clear: speed is survival, and waiting for official confirmation of Chinese attribution before acting is a losing proposition.

Now for those wanting to lock their digital doors against these advanced persistent threats, experts are singing the same chorus: patch early, patch often; monitor external perimeter for brute force attempts on VPNs and portals; segment your networks; and, crucially, invest in threat intelligence teams who know Mandarin and can decode those crafty new Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. Oh, and don’t sleep on user cybersecurity training—phishing remains the dragon’s favorite entry ticket.

And a note to universities—financial ties to China aside, staff and students need protection. According to commentary in The Unpopulist, Chinese students in the US are being surveilled and even threatened transnationally for expressing dissent, revealing the darker, often-overlooked human side of the cyber puzzle.

Listeners, thanks for tuning into Digital Dragon Watch where the firewall is hot and the takes even hotter. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a byte. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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