This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.

# US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates

Hey there, listeners. Ting here, and boy do we have a week ahead of us in the cybersecurity arena. The United States is basically going all-in on defending itself against Chinese cyber aggression, and the developments are coming fast and furious.

Let's start with the legislative victories because Congress just passed two absolutely critical bills that are going to reshape how America defends itself. Representative Andy Ogles introduced the PILLAR Act, which the House just approved, and this thing reauthorizes the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program through 2033. Now here's the clever part—the bill locks in current federal cost-sharing levels at 60 percent for single entities and 70 percent for multi-entity groups, but it sweetens the deal with a 5 percent boost for anyone implementing multi-factor authentication by 2028. We're talking about getting cybersecurity tools to places like rural counties and small towns that frankly have been getting pummeled by state-sponsored actors. The program, which originally came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, had expired on September 30th, so this renewal is huge.

But wait, there's more. The House also passed the Strengthening Cyber Resilience Against State-Sponsored Threats Act, also from Ogles, which creates an interagency task force led by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI specifically to tackle threats from China. The task force has to deliver classified reports to Congress annually for five years on Chinese Communist Party cyber operations. Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the Select Committee on China, highlighted that this directly targets threats like Volt Typhoon, which has been positioning itself in critical infrastructure waiting for the moment to strike.

Now here's where it gets spicy. Meanwhile, Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington is basically throwing down the gauntlet at Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr over plans to rescind cybersecurity rules that were adopted after the Salt Typhoon incident devastated American telecommunications companies. We're talking about Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen getting absolutely breached by Chinese-linked hackers. Salt Typhoon allowed the Chinese government to geolocate millions of individuals and record phone calls at will. Cantwell is pushing back hard against FCC efforts to walk back those protections after telecommunications carriers lobbied for rollbacks.

The backdrop here is genuinely alarming. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission just released its 2025 Annual Report stating that China has enhanced its capacity to blockade or launch an invasion of Taiwan with little advance warning. PLA incursions into Taiwan's air defense identification zone shot up from 20 in 2019 to 3,075 in 2024. This isn't just theoretical anymore—the House Select Committee on China warned that Chinese government-backed hackers are actively positioning themselves within critical infrastructure to wreak havoc.

So listeners, the U.S. government is essentially playing defense and offense simultaneously. They're hardening state and local defenses, coordinating federal agencies, protecting telecom infrastructure, and frankly, trying to prevent what could be a catastrophic scenario involving Taiwan and our electrical grid.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this breakdown. Make sure to subscribe for more analysis on what's happening in the cyber domain.

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