This is your Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves podcast.

This is Ting, your go-to for all things China, cyber, and sneak attacks, and today—October 26, 2025—I am on Red Alert. If you thought it was a chill fall Sunday, the digital front lines beg to differ. Let me bring you inside the world of Chinese cyber operations as they unfold, and trust me, the drama is thick, the code is fresher than your morning coffee, and the stakes? Nothing less than critical infrastructure, your power grid, and a showdown fit for a John le Carré novel—if he majored in computer science.

Let’s cut to today’s most hair-raising update: yesterday, CISA and the FBI pushed out emergency alerts after HRSD.COM, a major U.S. utility provider, got hammered by the Clop ransomware gang. Why’s that spicy for a segment on China? Because Clop and Qilin—another name you’ll want on your threat bingo card—are acting like open-source mercenaries these days, mixing methods with nation-state players. U.S. threat analysts suspect backchannel cooperation with Chinese intelligence or at least parallel timing, especially since these incidents spike during tense U.S.-China faceoffs over rare earth exports and semiconductors.

Here’s the timeline for the past 72 hours: Early Friday, DeXpose threat monitors flagged surges in phishing attempts targeting U.S. defense contractors and power utilities. By Friday night, Qilin’s ransomware—as “Ransomware-as-a-Service”—was clocked smashing 100 new victims this October alone, many in health care, manufacturing, and government. Saturday, CISA issued a rare joint advisory with the FBI warning specifically about persistent Chinese-linked attackers burrowing into utilities, municipal IT systems, and supply chain targets. The kicker? Newsweek confirmed SIM farms with links to China lighting up New York and the midwest, opening potential sabotage vectors on the telecom backbone.

But Beijing’s game is now just as much psychological as it is technical. Enter the “honey-trap.” According to the Robert Lansing Institute, the Ministry of State Security has gone full Bond villain—deploying female agents to cultivate relationships with tech insiders, snag credentials, and siphon IP. Why hack what you can seduce? Last month, U.S. counterintelligence straight-up banned state employees in China from dating locally. Not your typical patch-and-update fix.

What’s the escalation scenario if this keeps rolling? Think massive power outages timed with ransomware waves, compromised port infrastructure thanks to Chinese-made control systems, fake emergency alerts—possibly broadcast via hacked telecom switches—and total banking gridlock if financial IT is breached. These aren’t just fun cyberpunk hypotheticals; retired USMC officer Grant Newsham warns in Sunday Guardian Live that sabotage is set up to look like accident and confusion, unleashing drones, poisoned supply chains, and social media blame games before a single missile gets launched.

Mandatory defensive moves: If you’re in critical infrastructure and haven’t doubled MFA everywhere, run compromise assessments immediately—don’t just audit, assume breach. Backups must be offline and immutable, and threat intelligence—especially from DeXpose or Comparitech—needs feeding right into your XDR. Don’t ignore the social front: security awareness isn’t just about not clicking links, it’s about not giving your number to a mysterious “investor” at a tech happy hour.

Thanks for tuning in! Remember—subscribe for more deep dives and zero-day takes with me, Ting. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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