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Salt Typhoon Strikes: China Hacks Americas Telco Heartland in Cyber Siege of the Century
This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.
It’s Ting coming to you with another wild episode of Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege, and let me tell you, this week has been a digital rollercoaster only a nation-sized firewall could envy. If you blinked, you missed something.
Let’s start with the main event: the Salt Typhoon campaign. Chinese state-sponsored hackers, tracked jointly by the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unleashed a sophisticated attack wave on America's core telecommunications infrastructure—think AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon—targeting the digital arteries that keep the country’s comms alive. Brett Leatherman from the FBI calls it “a national defence crisis.” Salt Typhoon’s specialty? They blend in by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in routers and network appliances, hiding malicious traffic in plain sight, and using legitimate network protocols so defenders can’t spot the difference between a rogue packet and your grandma’s FaceTime call. These guys have been at it since 2019, but this week they spiked activity and hit more than 200 companies in 80 countries. Some say Beijing’s goals are old-school espionage, but analysts at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre say the real danger is sabotage—disrupting critical infrastructure on a scale possibly never seen before.
No shortage of attribution this week. Forensic teams at the National Cybersecurity Incident Management squad found clear evidence—malware dropped from IP ranges tied to Chinese registrants, C2 servers lighting up in provinces notorious for APT operations, and spearphishing emails that looked like they came straight from the Select Committee on Strategic Competition. These weren’t vague “maybe China, maybe not” findings. This was China, front and center, and they barely bothered to hide it. Mark Kelly and Greg Lesnewich flagged TA415 masquerading as US-China policy experts to phish US government and academic orgs with payloads latched onto economic trade talk. Crafty, but the end result was the same: someone, somewhere, lost way too much sleep over another fake PDF.
On the defense front, American teams shot back fast. CISA deployed new threat hunting playbooks and mandated full packet captures at key telecom exchanges. AT&T’s in-house cyber squad rolled out an unprecedented encrypted traffic analysis using AI trained specifically to spot Salt Typhoon malware signatures. And the FBI upped their bounty to $10 million for tips on Salt Typhoon crew identities—a cyber version of ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on steroids.
Cybersecurity legends like Joshua Chung and Golo Mühr warn listeners not to underestimate Mustang Panda, another China-aligned group, who dropped the SnakeDisk USB worm with geofencing so cleverly designed it only activates in Thailand. That’s next-level ops—geo-aware malware with command and control built to blend in with proxy traffic.
Lessons learned? Invest more in centralized security controls. The government just tightened penalties for companies that delay breach reports—and announced they’ll launch probes even when companies don’t tell anyone. Joshua Chung said it best: “Next-gen attacks require next-gen defense—behavioral analytics, global threat sharing, and AI at every chokepoint.” Translation: you need to go full cyber ninja, not just stack firewalls.
Listeners, thanks for riding the hackwave with Ting! Subscribe to Dragon’s Code for more digital intel that keeps your systems safe and your coffee nervously hot. 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
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
It’s Ting coming to you with another wild episode of Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege, and let me tell you, this week has been a digital rollercoaster only a nation-sized firewall could envy. If you blinked, you missed something.
Let’s start with the main event: the Salt Typhoon campaign. Chinese state-sponsored hackers, tracked jointly by the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unleashed a sophisticated attack wave on America's core telecommunications infrastructure—think AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon—targeting the digital arteries that keep the country’s comms alive. Brett Leatherman from the FBI calls it “a national defence crisis.” Salt Typhoon’s specialty? They blend in by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in routers and network appliances, hiding malicious traffic in plain sight, and using legitimate network protocols so defenders can’t spot the difference between a rogue packet and your grandma’s FaceTime call. These guys have been at it since 2019, but this week they spiked activity and hit more than 200 companies in 80 countries. Some say Beijing’s goals are old-school espionage, but analysts at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre say the real danger is sabotage—disrupting critical infrastructure on a scale possibly never seen before.
No shortage of attribution this week. Forensic teams at the National Cybersecurity Incident Management squad found clear evidence—malware dropped from IP ranges tied to Chinese registrants, C2 servers lighting up in provinces notorious for APT operations, and spearphishing emails that looked like they came straight from the Select Committee on Strategic Competition. These weren’t vague “maybe China, maybe not” findings. This was China, front and center, and they barely bothered to hide it. Mark Kelly and Greg Lesnewich flagged TA415 masquerading as US-China policy experts to phish US government and academic orgs with payloads latched onto economic trade talk. Crafty, but the end result was the same: someone, somewhere, lost way too much sleep over another fake PDF.
On the defense front, American teams shot back fast. CISA deployed new threat hunting playbooks and mandated full packet captures at key telecom exchanges. AT&T’s in-house cyber squad rolled out an unprecedented encrypted traffic analysis using AI trained specifically to spot Salt Typhoon malware signatures. And the FBI upped their bounty to $10 million for tips on Salt Typhoon crew identities—a cyber version of ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on steroids.
Cybersecurity legends like Joshua Chung and Golo Mühr warn listeners not to underestimate Mustang Panda, another China-aligned group, who dropped the SnakeDisk USB worm with geofencing so cleverly designed it only activates in Thailand. That’s next-level ops—geo-aware malware with command and control built to blend in with proxy traffic.
Lessons learned? Invest more in centralized security controls. The government just tightened penalties for companies that delay breach reports—and announced they’ll launch probes even when companies don’t tell anyone. Joshua Chung said it best: “Next-gen attacks require next-gen defense—behavioral analytics, global threat sharing, and AI at every chokepoint.” Translation: you need to go full cyber ninja, not just stack firewalls.
Listeners, thanks for riding the hackwave with Ting! Subscribe to Dragon’s Code for more digital intel that keeps your systems safe and your coffee nervously hot. 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
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
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By Inception Point AiThis is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.
It’s Ting coming to you with another wild episode of Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege, and let me tell you, this week has been a digital rollercoaster only a nation-sized firewall could envy. If you blinked, you missed something.
Let’s start with the main event: the Salt Typhoon campaign. Chinese state-sponsored hackers, tracked jointly by the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unleashed a sophisticated attack wave on America's core telecommunications infrastructure—think AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon—targeting the digital arteries that keep the country’s comms alive. Brett Leatherman from the FBI calls it “a national defence crisis.” Salt Typhoon’s specialty? They blend in by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in routers and network appliances, hiding malicious traffic in plain sight, and using legitimate network protocols so defenders can’t spot the difference between a rogue packet and your grandma’s FaceTime call. These guys have been at it since 2019, but this week they spiked activity and hit more than 200 companies in 80 countries. Some say Beijing’s goals are old-school espionage, but analysts at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre say the real danger is sabotage—disrupting critical infrastructure on a scale possibly never seen before.
No shortage of attribution this week. Forensic teams at the National Cybersecurity Incident Management squad found clear evidence—malware dropped from IP ranges tied to Chinese registrants, C2 servers lighting up in provinces notorious for APT operations, and spearphishing emails that looked like they came straight from the Select Committee on Strategic Competition. These weren’t vague “maybe China, maybe not” findings. This was China, front and center, and they barely bothered to hide it. Mark Kelly and Greg Lesnewich flagged TA415 masquerading as US-China policy experts to phish US government and academic orgs with payloads latched onto economic trade talk. Crafty, but the end result was the same: someone, somewhere, lost way too much sleep over another fake PDF.
On the defense front, American teams shot back fast. CISA deployed new threat hunting playbooks and mandated full packet captures at key telecom exchanges. AT&T’s in-house cyber squad rolled out an unprecedented encrypted traffic analysis using AI trained specifically to spot Salt Typhoon malware signatures. And the FBI upped their bounty to $10 million for tips on Salt Typhoon crew identities—a cyber version of ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on steroids.
Cybersecurity legends like Joshua Chung and Golo Mühr warn listeners not to underestimate Mustang Panda, another China-aligned group, who dropped the SnakeDisk USB worm with geofencing so cleverly designed it only activates in Thailand. That’s next-level ops—geo-aware malware with command and control built to blend in with proxy traffic.
Lessons learned? Invest more in centralized security controls. The government just tightened penalties for companies that delay breach reports—and announced they’ll launch probes even when companies don’t tell anyone. Joshua Chung said it best: “Next-gen attacks require next-gen defense—behavioral analytics, global threat sharing, and AI at every chokepoint.” Translation: you need to go full cyber ninja, not just stack firewalls.
Listeners, thanks for riding the hackwave with Ting! Subscribe to Dragon’s Code for more digital intel that keeps your systems safe and your coffee nervously hot. 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
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
It’s Ting coming to you with another wild episode of Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege, and let me tell you, this week has been a digital rollercoaster only a nation-sized firewall could envy. If you blinked, you missed something.
Let’s start with the main event: the Salt Typhoon campaign. Chinese state-sponsored hackers, tracked jointly by the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unleashed a sophisticated attack wave on America's core telecommunications infrastructure—think AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon—targeting the digital arteries that keep the country’s comms alive. Brett Leatherman from the FBI calls it “a national defence crisis.” Salt Typhoon’s specialty? They blend in by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in routers and network appliances, hiding malicious traffic in plain sight, and using legitimate network protocols so defenders can’t spot the difference between a rogue packet and your grandma’s FaceTime call. These guys have been at it since 2019, but this week they spiked activity and hit more than 200 companies in 80 countries. Some say Beijing’s goals are old-school espionage, but analysts at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre say the real danger is sabotage—disrupting critical infrastructure on a scale possibly never seen before.
No shortage of attribution this week. Forensic teams at the National Cybersecurity Incident Management squad found clear evidence—malware dropped from IP ranges tied to Chinese registrants, C2 servers lighting up in provinces notorious for APT operations, and spearphishing emails that looked like they came straight from the Select Committee on Strategic Competition. These weren’t vague “maybe China, maybe not” findings. This was China, front and center, and they barely bothered to hide it. Mark Kelly and Greg Lesnewich flagged TA415 masquerading as US-China policy experts to phish US government and academic orgs with payloads latched onto economic trade talk. Crafty, but the end result was the same: someone, somewhere, lost way too much sleep over another fake PDF.
On the defense front, American teams shot back fast. CISA deployed new threat hunting playbooks and mandated full packet captures at key telecom exchanges. AT&T’s in-house cyber squad rolled out an unprecedented encrypted traffic analysis using AI trained specifically to spot Salt Typhoon malware signatures. And the FBI upped their bounty to $10 million for tips on Salt Typhoon crew identities—a cyber version of ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on steroids.
Cybersecurity legends like Joshua Chung and Golo Mühr warn listeners not to underestimate Mustang Panda, another China-aligned group, who dropped the SnakeDisk USB worm with geofencing so cleverly designed it only activates in Thailand. That’s next-level ops—geo-aware malware with command and control built to blend in with proxy traffic.
Lessons learned? Invest more in centralized security controls. The government just tightened penalties for companies that delay breach reports—and announced they’ll launch probes even when companies don’t tell anyone. Joshua Chung said it best: “Next-gen attacks require next-gen defense—behavioral analytics, global threat sharing, and AI at every chokepoint.” Translation: you need to go full cyber ninja, not just stack firewalls.
Listeners, thanks for riding the hackwave with Ting! Subscribe to Dragon’s Code for more digital intel that keeps your systems safe and your coffee nervously hot. 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
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI