This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.

I’m Ting, and if there’s one thing I love more than a spicy hotpot, it’s dissecting China’s most brazen cyber moves—especially when the whole country is running digital fire drills. This past week? Welcome to Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege. It’s like “24” meets Shanghai—except the explosions all happen in cyberspace, and the heroes are cybersecurity engineers with too much caffeine.

So, here’s what went down. On Thursday, just after most of you had started doomscrolling the morning news, Salt Typhoon took center stage. This was a state-sponsored hack, and experts from both KonBriefing and Microsoft’s threat teams quickly pinned the tactics and digital fingerprints to a group operating out of eastern China, likely connected to PLA Unit 61398. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill ransomware. Salt Typhoon slipped in through telecom infrastructure—think millions of call logs, location data, and even those ‘are you free for dinner?’ texts. Over eight million people, including politicians, had private communications quietly siphoned out of the country. Top-tier espionage move, especially since they used zero-day exploits and chained privilege escalation attacks to stay invisible for months.

Attribution? Microsoft’s team noticed the attackers’ kill chain matched previous Volt Typhoon patterns: lateral movement through outdated VPN appliances, living-off-the-land tools so nothing triggered antivirus, and encrypted data exfiltration using custom protocols. FBI forensics recovered command-and-control addresses linked directly to Shenzhen ISPs, and National Guard deployment rosters showed unauthorized access logs synced with Chinese daylight hours. If there was ever a week for Congress to convene emergency classified briefings, this was it.

Of course, Salt Typhoon didn’t stop at snooping—service outages in telecoms followed. What gave the hack global flavor was its coordination: CM Alliance notes that, earlier in the year, similar intrusions hit water utilities and hospital systems. Experts like Anna Economides at Northeastern University warned that even strong encryption only slows elite actors—not stops them. With physical and digital access, attackers can intercept or analyze traffic flows for metadata, even without decrypting the payload. The actual payload? That’s still being unraveled, but it’s clear they had a bird’s-eye view into critical American resilience.

The White House’s counterpunch rolled out fast. Department of Homeland Security, led by CISA, shipped mandatory AI-driven threat detection to telecoms—think anomaly hunting, multi-factor authentication as the default, and a blanket ban on China-linked firmware updates. Booz Allen Hamilton, fresh off a $421 million homeland security contract, deployed its best teams to audit network logs and patch the zero-days. Publicly, the Department of Commerce added over 50 Chinese tech suppliers to the infamous entity list; Integrity Technology Group was sanctioned for enabling infrastructure hacks across energy and transport sectors—a signal that Chinese software supply chains are now radioactive for American critical industries.

Lessons? According to security pros like Charles Clancy at MITRE, the only way forward is “quantum-resistant cryptography and zero-trust everything.” This week proves—again—that proactive intelligence sharing and global incident reporting are mission critical. And that, listeners, is how Dragon’s Code stays ahead—at least for now.

Thanks for tuning in, keep your passwords strong, and don’t forget to subscribe. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI