This is your Silicon Siege: China's Tech Offensive podcast.

The past two weeks in cyberland have been a parade of silicon carnage—welcome to Silicon Siege, listeners, with your host Ting, bringing the freshest byte-sized drama from China’s wild tech offensive. No need for a VPN to spot Beijing’s fingerprints smudged all over America’s most valuable digital real estate. Let’s plug in.

First, we need to talk about this year’s biggest boogeyman, Salt Typhoon. The operation, tied to China’s Ministry of State Security, has been seeping into US telecom infrastructure for years, but in the last fortnight, things escalated with an audacity that would make even an APT blush. Imagine hackers quietly surfing through the backdoors of AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies—pilfering call metadata, internet logs, and, if US intelligence is right, poking around the private lives of virtually every American adult. According to The National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross’ remarks at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit, Salt Typhoon is now considered one of the largest espionage campaigns ever, and affects users in 80-plus countries. The FBI and NSA are in maximum broom mode, but plenty of digital footprints remain.

The implications are industrial espionage on an almost operatic scale. By exploiting core telecom systems, Chinese operatives have snapshots of sensitive business negotiations, R&D calls, and even court-ordered surveillance exchanges. Industry experts, like those at Captain Compliance and the Fortune 500 CISO panel, warn this isn’t just about mass data—it’s about connecting dots to leverage everything from elections to corporate mergers.

Not to be left out, recently, China-linked APT41 tuned up their old-school phishing for a modern encore. According to The House Select Committee on China, APT41 hackers impersonated Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, spraying trade officials with emails rigged to snatch Microsoft 365 credentials and exfiltrate trade negotiation data. Analysts note that this effort follows previous attempts targeting ZPMC’s port crane dominance, giving Beijing a real-time dashboard of American maritime operations. Talk about playing chess on both sides of the board.

The hits keep coming on the supply chain front too—analysts are sweating over silent Chinese infiltration of NPM packages and third-party support contracts for legacy US tech inside China. Remember, maintenance deals with major players like Dell, IBM, and HP, still leave the US tech sector’s soft underbelly exposed. Whether it’s cryptostealing malware sneaking through open source or old firmware in server closets, supply chain compromise is now a daily headline risk.

Strategically, the US is scrambling to catch up. Sean Cairncross—now the nation's top cyber official—outlined an aggressive pivot: revive the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, harden federal tech, and finally, get all those quirky states, agencies, and companies to talk to each other. But experts worry that as quantum leaps closer, and surveillance states scale with AI, remediation will only get pricier and slower.

So, what’s next? More targeted phishing, deeper supply chain tampering, and a likely escalation in China’s ability to influence both commercial and political outcomes via data they shouldn’t have. As Jake Williams of Rendition Infosec says, “If you don’t know who’s in your network, odds are it’s China.”

Thanks for tuning in! Don’t forget to subscribe for more cyber intrigue on Silicon Siege. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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