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

This is Ting, your go-to cyber watcher, and if you’ve had even one eye on the newsfeeds lately, you know it’s been another wild set of days on the digital frontline—think less fire drill, more live-fire exercise. It’s Friday, September 12, 2025, and this is Red Alert: China’s Daily Cyber Moves. Let’s jump straight into the forensics lab, because you’re going to want to know exactly how Beijing is rolling their dice on our networks.

Yesterday afternoon the FBI, fresh off a new joint advisory with CISA, issued emergency alerts across federal contractors and telecoms—Salt Typhoon is back, and this time they aren’t just swiping email attachments. Last night’s incident at a San Diego transit authority saw thousands of badge records exfiltrated, with investigators linking the malware loader to the Volt Typhoon toolkit, the same playbook used earlier this summer to burrow into a Midwest energy provider. CYFIRMA’s latest intelligence drops confirm the Salt Typhoon campaign has graduated from bland credential harvesting to deep infrastructure compromise, leveraging supply-chain partners and vendors as jump points into military, telecom, and even city government systems.

Here’s your fast timeline so you can keep up:

On September 9, telecom operators in New York and Seattle triggered anomalies during routine endpoint scans; weird privilege escalation signatures, flagged by what turned out to be new variations in the APT41 custom malware family. By September 10, coordinated malicious traffic was detected against a logistics software provider tied to Navy logistics contracts, and by dawn yesterday, September 11, CISA’s advisory line had already logged over fifty cross-sector breach notifications—the vast majority linked by new TTPs like process hollowing, living-off-the-land binaries, and lateral movement through cloud infrastructure APIs.

If you’re wondering, “How are they getting in?”—think spearphishing, classic, but now turbo-charged by deepfake AI: one update floating from the July China trade talks uncovered Chinese hackers impersonating Rep. Michelle Cruz, sending malware-laced policy documents to trade groups and government attorneys. The social engineering game is tight, folks.

As of this afternoon, emergency directives have gone out: mandatory rotating of API keys, rapid patching of any cloud admin interfaces, and—get this—physical audits of badge access logs for anyone in critical roles. The FBI is actively hunting for artifacts of a potentially bigger play: sabotage prep, much like what Volt Typhoon trialed in live environments last spring.

Escalation? If Salt Typhoon’s current trajectory continues, the next phase won’t just be data theft; we’re talking potential kinetic impact—think outages in transportation, telemedicine, even critical water infrastructure. And the worst-case scenario? With CISA’s legal authority literally expiring in eighteen days, any delay in reauthorization could punch holes in the only public-private shield we’ve got. As Just Security points out, letting this lapse opens giant blind spots right as the threat is peaking.

If you manage risk, or even just care what’s possible on a bad day, here’s what’s actionable now: patch fast, verify endpoints even faster, and escalate anything suspicious—no matter how small. In this cloud-enabled cat-and-mouse, the attacker only has to win once. So double-check today, sleep tomorrow.

Thanks for tuning in, and if you’re not subscribed yet, smash that button so you don’t miss the next wave as it hits. 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