Beijing's Cyber Spree: Hackers Gone Wild Across 80 Countries!

This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

Listeners, Ting here—your favorite cyber sentinel, reporting from the digital battleground where bits fly faster than dumplings at a Beijing night market. Today is August 27, 2025, and let’s dive straight into Beijing Watch: the last few days have been a whirlwind in the world of Chinese cyber operations affecting US security.

First up, the big, shiny red dragon on everyone’s radar: the Salt Typhoon crew and their APT kin. Over the past week, fresh advisories from the FBI, CISA, NSA, plus partners across 12 nations have confirmed Beijing-backed hackers are on a global spree—not just poking around, but infesting networks in telecommunications, government, lodging, transport, and even military sectors. According to Brett Leatherman at the FBI, the scope breaks every rule of reasonable cyber espionage. Hackers aren’t just stealing data, they’re burrowing through routers—particularly backbone, provider edge, and customer edge—from New York to Frankfurt, hopping between compromised devices before pulling off the final Crouching Tiger Hidden Pivot into target systems.

Targeted industries this week: telecom (always), Internet service providers (ISPs), travel, and logistics—places where data is king and movement is queen. By decrypting administrator credentials and tweaking router firmware, the attackers turn critical systems into sleeper cells for long-term access, perfect for tracking communications and movements across continents. The joint advisories even name-drop entities fueling the campaign—Sichuan Juxinhe, Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong, and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie—providing cyber juice to the Ministry of State Security and occasionally lending a hand to the PLA.

Attribution this week is less vague than ever. Allied spy agencies, especially out of London and Washington, are openly blaming Chinese tech firms for enabling what they’re calling “unrestrained cyber intrusion.” Spy shops from Australia to Japan are chiming in—the band is big, the ball is global. This isn’t about polite digital eavesdropping; it’s about persistent, indiscriminate targeting across 80 countries and hundreds of US organizations. Beijing is letting its commercial proxies pick targets off the menu, and privacy is the casualty.

International response? The unity is real. The joint advisories were co-signed by heavy hitters: Five Eyes countries, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and more—with matching operational playbooks from the NSA and CISA. There’s a new playbook being stitched together, and collaboration is the operative word. The success of Operation Serengeti 2025, coordinated by INTERPOL and AFRIPOL, is a model for future crackdowns—not just arrests and asset seizures, but strong partnerships across the private and public sectors.

Recommended security measures—so listen closely, tech defenders! Patch those known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs), activate centralized logging, and lock down your edge infrastructure. Threat hunting is essential; look for firmware modifications, rogue traffic, odd admin credential attempts. And don’t just focus on high-value endpoints—track from the edge to the core. Understand the adversary's access points before firing off mitigation tactics, maximizing your chance for total eviction.

Strategically, this is a wakeup call: perimeter-only defense is laughable, and “just trust the router” is a dangerous bedtime story. Tactically, persistence is the threat to beat—once these actors are in, they’re hard to flush and their activity is designed to blend in. Organizations must prep for not just technical battles but intelligence-sharing, international compliance, and ongoing resilience upgrades.

That wraps the week in Beijing Watch—where hacks get hackier and alliances get smarter. Thanks for tuning in, listeners! Don’t forget to subscribe for cyber sentinels updates: this has been a quiet...