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Pentagon's China Cloud Chaos: Hegseth's Hissy Fit, Hackers Gone Wild, and Trump's Chip Flip-Flop
This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.
Let’s cut right to it, listeners: Today is July 23, 2025, and I’m Ting, your digital insider on all things US-China CyberPulse. And what a week it’s been! Early Monday, Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth ordered a top-down scrub of the Defense Department’s entire tech supply chain. Why? Thanks to a spicy ProPublica exposé, the Pentagon realized Microsoft had, unintentionally or not, let China-based engineers work on DOD cloud systems. Cue the alarms—Hegseth basically grabbed his digital megaphone (also known as X) and declared, “No more Chinese labor in our cloud services—period.” The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Dave McKeown, has 15 days to hammer out new protections. If anyone is still using legacy systems built back in the Obama era, it’s going to be a fun audit. Acting CIO Katie Arrington’s Software Fast Track, the FedRAMP cloud security process, and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification are all getting beefed-up reviews to make sure there’s zero adversarial influence.
Now, the private sector isn’t exactly sleeping on this. Microsoft, in pure panic mode, rolled out urgent patches this week for SharePoint servers—a juicy target for three Chinese nation-state groups: Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603. These folks aren’t amateurs. Since July 7, they’ve been exploiting not one, but four critical SharePoint vulnerabilities. For anybody running on-prem SharePoint 2016, 2019, or Subscription Edition, Microsoft’s serving a buffet of security updates and basically screaming “Enable antimalware, rotate your machine keys, and restart IIS yesterday!” According to Cynthia Kaiser, formerly of the FBI, this is likely just the opening act—a longer campaign is expected.
Things got even curiouser on Capitol Hill. Nvidia and AMD got a surprise green light from President Trump’s White House to sell some high-end AI chips to China. The pivot comes after years of trying to freeze out China entirely, leaving many in Congress dizzy. John Moolenaar and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the China Committee’s power duo, sound the alarm about “handing over advanced technology,” though, as historian Chris Miller reminds us, these chips aren’t the crown jewels. Still, with China feverishly building domestic tech, the policy flip-flops have industry and security hawks running circles around each other.
Internationally, this week’s SharePoint smash-and-grab sent CISA stomping its foot, ordering agencies to patch everything by today. Meanwhile, China, ever the diplomatic acrobat, publicly denied any role in the wave of global hacking, calling allegations “unfounded” and pushing for, you guessed it, more international cyber-cooperation. No surprise there!
On tech defense, the Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan pushes both the government and the private sector to lock down critical infrastructure with AI-driven tools. The mantra is “secure-by-design” for all new systems, even though funding, definitions, and standards remain fuzzy. The AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a new creature from the Department of Homeland Security, aims to unite industry and government on AI-related cyber intel. Great in theory, but I’ll believe the bots are protecting our power grid when they can outsmart prompt injection and data poisoning.
That wraps a wild week in the cyber trenches. Listeners, thanks for riding the pulse with me. Don’t forget to subscribe, and always patch before you relax. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
Let’s cut right to it, listeners: Today is July 23, 2025, and I’m Ting, your digital insider on all things US-China CyberPulse. And what a week it’s been! Early Monday, Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth ordered a top-down scrub of the Defense Department’s entire tech supply chain. Why? Thanks to a spicy ProPublica exposé, the Pentagon realized Microsoft had, unintentionally or not, let China-based engineers work on DOD cloud systems. Cue the alarms—Hegseth basically grabbed his digital megaphone (also known as X) and declared, “No more Chinese labor in our cloud services—period.” The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Dave McKeown, has 15 days to hammer out new protections. If anyone is still using legacy systems built back in the Obama era, it’s going to be a fun audit. Acting CIO Katie Arrington’s Software Fast Track, the FedRAMP cloud security process, and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification are all getting beefed-up reviews to make sure there’s zero adversarial influence.
Now, the private sector isn’t exactly sleeping on this. Microsoft, in pure panic mode, rolled out urgent patches this week for SharePoint servers—a juicy target for three Chinese nation-state groups: Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603. These folks aren’t amateurs. Since July 7, they’ve been exploiting not one, but four critical SharePoint vulnerabilities. For anybody running on-prem SharePoint 2016, 2019, or Subscription Edition, Microsoft’s serving a buffet of security updates and basically screaming “Enable antimalware, rotate your machine keys, and restart IIS yesterday!” According to Cynthia Kaiser, formerly of the FBI, this is likely just the opening act—a longer campaign is expected.
Things got even curiouser on Capitol Hill. Nvidia and AMD got a surprise green light from President Trump’s White House to sell some high-end AI chips to China. The pivot comes after years of trying to freeze out China entirely, leaving many in Congress dizzy. John Moolenaar and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the China Committee’s power duo, sound the alarm about “handing over advanced technology,” though, as historian Chris Miller reminds us, these chips aren’t the crown jewels. Still, with China feverishly building domestic tech, the policy flip-flops have industry and security hawks running circles around each other.
Internationally, this week’s SharePoint smash-and-grab sent CISA stomping its foot, ordering agencies to patch everything by today. Meanwhile, China, ever the diplomatic acrobat, publicly denied any role in the wave of global hacking, calling allegations “unfounded” and pushing for, you guessed it, more international cyber-cooperation. No surprise there!
On tech defense, the Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan pushes both the government and the private sector to lock down critical infrastructure with AI-driven tools. The mantra is “secure-by-design” for all new systems, even though funding, definitions, and standards remain fuzzy. The AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a new creature from the Department of Homeland Security, aims to unite industry and government on AI-related cyber intel. Great in theory, but I’ll believe the bots are protecting our power grid when they can outsmart prompt injection and data poisoning.
That wraps a wild week in the cyber trenches. Listeners, thanks for riding the pulse with me. Don’t forget to subscribe, and always patch before you relax. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
View all episodes
By Quiet. PleaseThis is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.
Let’s cut right to it, listeners: Today is July 23, 2025, and I’m Ting, your digital insider on all things US-China CyberPulse. And what a week it’s been! Early Monday, Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth ordered a top-down scrub of the Defense Department’s entire tech supply chain. Why? Thanks to a spicy ProPublica exposé, the Pentagon realized Microsoft had, unintentionally or not, let China-based engineers work on DOD cloud systems. Cue the alarms—Hegseth basically grabbed his digital megaphone (also known as X) and declared, “No more Chinese labor in our cloud services—period.” The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Dave McKeown, has 15 days to hammer out new protections. If anyone is still using legacy systems built back in the Obama era, it’s going to be a fun audit. Acting CIO Katie Arrington’s Software Fast Track, the FedRAMP cloud security process, and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification are all getting beefed-up reviews to make sure there’s zero adversarial influence.
Now, the private sector isn’t exactly sleeping on this. Microsoft, in pure panic mode, rolled out urgent patches this week for SharePoint servers—a juicy target for three Chinese nation-state groups: Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603. These folks aren’t amateurs. Since July 7, they’ve been exploiting not one, but four critical SharePoint vulnerabilities. For anybody running on-prem SharePoint 2016, 2019, or Subscription Edition, Microsoft’s serving a buffet of security updates and basically screaming “Enable antimalware, rotate your machine keys, and restart IIS yesterday!” According to Cynthia Kaiser, formerly of the FBI, this is likely just the opening act—a longer campaign is expected.
Things got even curiouser on Capitol Hill. Nvidia and AMD got a surprise green light from President Trump’s White House to sell some high-end AI chips to China. The pivot comes after years of trying to freeze out China entirely, leaving many in Congress dizzy. John Moolenaar and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the China Committee’s power duo, sound the alarm about “handing over advanced technology,” though, as historian Chris Miller reminds us, these chips aren’t the crown jewels. Still, with China feverishly building domestic tech, the policy flip-flops have industry and security hawks running circles around each other.
Internationally, this week’s SharePoint smash-and-grab sent CISA stomping its foot, ordering agencies to patch everything by today. Meanwhile, China, ever the diplomatic acrobat, publicly denied any role in the wave of global hacking, calling allegations “unfounded” and pushing for, you guessed it, more international cyber-cooperation. No surprise there!
On tech defense, the Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan pushes both the government and the private sector to lock down critical infrastructure with AI-driven tools. The mantra is “secure-by-design” for all new systems, even though funding, definitions, and standards remain fuzzy. The AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a new creature from the Department of Homeland Security, aims to unite industry and government on AI-related cyber intel. Great in theory, but I’ll believe the bots are protecting our power grid when they can outsmart prompt injection and data poisoning.
That wraps a wild week in the cyber trenches. Listeners, thanks for riding the pulse with me. Don’t forget to subscribe, and always patch before you relax. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
Let’s cut right to it, listeners: Today is July 23, 2025, and I’m Ting, your digital insider on all things US-China CyberPulse. And what a week it’s been! Early Monday, Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth ordered a top-down scrub of the Defense Department’s entire tech supply chain. Why? Thanks to a spicy ProPublica exposé, the Pentagon realized Microsoft had, unintentionally or not, let China-based engineers work on DOD cloud systems. Cue the alarms—Hegseth basically grabbed his digital megaphone (also known as X) and declared, “No more Chinese labor in our cloud services—period.” The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Dave McKeown, has 15 days to hammer out new protections. If anyone is still using legacy systems built back in the Obama era, it’s going to be a fun audit. Acting CIO Katie Arrington’s Software Fast Track, the FedRAMP cloud security process, and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification are all getting beefed-up reviews to make sure there’s zero adversarial influence.
Now, the private sector isn’t exactly sleeping on this. Microsoft, in pure panic mode, rolled out urgent patches this week for SharePoint servers—a juicy target for three Chinese nation-state groups: Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603. These folks aren’t amateurs. Since July 7, they’ve been exploiting not one, but four critical SharePoint vulnerabilities. For anybody running on-prem SharePoint 2016, 2019, or Subscription Edition, Microsoft’s serving a buffet of security updates and basically screaming “Enable antimalware, rotate your machine keys, and restart IIS yesterday!” According to Cynthia Kaiser, formerly of the FBI, this is likely just the opening act—a longer campaign is expected.
Things got even curiouser on Capitol Hill. Nvidia and AMD got a surprise green light from President Trump’s White House to sell some high-end AI chips to China. The pivot comes after years of trying to freeze out China entirely, leaving many in Congress dizzy. John Moolenaar and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the China Committee’s power duo, sound the alarm about “handing over advanced technology,” though, as historian Chris Miller reminds us, these chips aren’t the crown jewels. Still, with China feverishly building domestic tech, the policy flip-flops have industry and security hawks running circles around each other.
Internationally, this week’s SharePoint smash-and-grab sent CISA stomping its foot, ordering agencies to patch everything by today. Meanwhile, China, ever the diplomatic acrobat, publicly denied any role in the wave of global hacking, calling allegations “unfounded” and pushing for, you guessed it, more international cyber-cooperation. No surprise there!
On tech defense, the Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan pushes both the government and the private sector to lock down critical infrastructure with AI-driven tools. The mantra is “secure-by-design” for all new systems, even though funding, definitions, and standards remain fuzzy. The AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a new creature from the Department of Homeland Security, aims to unite industry and government on AI-related cyber intel. Great in theory, but I’ll believe the bots are protecting our power grid when they can outsmart prompt injection and data poisoning.
That wraps a wild week in the cyber trenches. Listeners, thanks for riding the pulse with me. Don’t forget to subscribe, and always patch before you relax. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta