China's Cyber Dragons Unleashed: Hacking Havoc from Cloud to Zero-Day

This is your China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense podcast.

Hello, cyber defenders, this is Ting with today’s China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense, and as usual, I’m slicing into the freshest digital dumplings straight out of the global threat kitchen. The last 24 hours have been non-stop: new malware, emergency patches, and big warnings—let’s dive right in and see how the cyber dragons are breathing fire across US interests.

CrowdStrike’s latest threat hunt just dropped and the headline is clear: Chinese state-linked actors have supercharged their assault on US cloud systems. This isn’t a drizzle; it’s a cyber typhoon with a 40 percent spike in China-nexus intrusions, fueled by crews like Genesis Panda and Murky Panda. These groups aren’t just lurking—they’re exploiting web-facing vulnerabilities, hijacking cloud service provider accounts, and even leveraging trusted partners’ access to slither deeper into victims’ Entra ID tenants. The targeted sectors are a who’s-who of critical US infrastructure: government, tech giants, finance, and especially telecommunications have been hammered since dawn yesterday.

Of course, cloud isn’t the only front. According to Forescout’s new threat review, zero-day exploitation is up by 46 percent this year and China is the most prolific origin, clocking in with a whopping 33 active groups. Microsoft and Google zero-days have been busy, but the spotlight for today is on network infrastructure. Over 20 percent of newly exploited vulnerabilities this morning were aimed precisely at edge devices—think VPNs, firewalls, and remote access tools. These are your digital border guards, folks, and attackers are slipping through the cracks.

For those tracking malware evolution, CNCERT’s fresh analysis blames US intelligence for recent Exchange server breaches in China, but don’t let the propaganda distract—Chinese APTs continue to hammer US email servers using custom malware and in-memory backdoors that route exfiltration through European relay nodes—yes, still happening as of this morning. Credit where it’s due, those attackers are magicians at log wiping and stealthy persistence. On the offensive side, the US and China remain locked in a cyberarms escalator, with both sides accusing each other of planting backdoors in off-the-shelf hardware—Nvidia, I see you!

Let’s pivot to patches and warnings. CISA just flashed a red alert for three new vulnerabilities actively exploited by China-linked groups—one critical bug in a leading enterprise VPN stack, a nasty privilege escalation in widely deployed cloud infrastructure, and a severe SharePoint zero-day. If you haven’t applied the out-of-band emergency patches from late last night, what are you doing? Patch those endpoints now. CISA emphasizes implementing least privilege access, mandatory multi-factor authentication for all external cloud apps, and reviewing your logs for any weird SSH tunnels—especially those masquerading as legitimate messaging traffic.

The Salt Typhoon attack from last December is making waves again too, as details about wiretap exploitation and telecommunications data leaks resurface. Dr. Susan Landau at Tufts warns the CALEA wiretapping mandate is an open door for Chinese APTs—yikes, the very infrastructure meant to protect us is now a vulnerability.

Big reminder: CISA’s Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Catalog just dropped this afternoon. Check if you’re running devices in the KEV list—if so, update now and monitor like a hawk. There’s no such thing as a sleepy day in cyber defense, so stay sharp out there!

That wraps up today’s China Hack Report. Thanks for listening, don’t forget to subscribe, and stay spiky. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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