China's Five-Year Hack Plan: Telco Routers, Cancer Research, and Electric Cars, Oh My!

This is your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert podcast.

Welcome, cyber sleuths! Ting here, your guide to the wild world of China cyber, serving up the latest from Digital Dragon Watch. Forget the fluff—let’s get you straight to the main event because the last seven days have crackled with activity in Beijing’s digital playground.

With China’s 14th Five-Year Plan set to sunset in a few months, security folks are on edge. This master roadmap isn’t just about infrastructure and economic growth; it’s cyber warfare by another name. Beijing has been treating bulk data—think voter rolls, DMV records, health data—as strategic fuel, with state-backed hackers gunning for those goldmines to supercharge their AI, perfect espionage, and, frankly, map out U.S. society better than some states can! That’s not speculation; as Nuharbor Security points out, the steady rise in aggressive, patient hacks on American utilities, transportation, and local governments looks very much like the execution layer of the Five-Year Plan’s script.

Speaking of aggressive, the global advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency last week confirmed what most cyber pros have suspected since 2021: China-linked Advanced Persistent Threats—groups like Salt Typhoon and RedMike—have been breaching critical infrastructure networks worldwide. Their new favorite playground? Backbone routers at major telcos, especially in the U.S., but also in Australia, Canada, the UK, and across the EU. Their trick is exploiting public vulnerabilities—yes, sometimes those patched years ago!—then establishing persistent backdoors by modifying router configurations and hiding traffic in plain sight.

Let’s spotlight fresh attack vectors: Ivanti Connect Secure’s CVE-2024-21887, Palo Alto’s CVE-2024-3400, and Cisco’s infamous 2023 IOS XE exploits. Chinese operators are chaining these vulnerabilities, escalating privileges, and securing admin access—often by exposing SSH and RDP on weird ports to dodge detection. If you’re running old firmware, consider your network a welcome mat.

Some hacks are hitting closer to home. Last week, law enforcement charged Yunhai Li with trying to smuggle cancer research from MD Anderson Cancer Center back to China. The U.S. DOJ and Department of Commerce are driving home new research security frameworks, and Texas just enacted House Bill 127, locking down academic partnerships and enforcing stricter vetting on tech handoffs. It’s all part of a national push, echoed by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, to stop talent-recruitment programs and prevent proprietary research from walking out the front door.

State and local governments are also in the crosshairs. The House Homeland Security panel just advanced legislation to extend vital state and local cyber grants, and Rep. Andy Ogles made no bones: if Washington doesn’t pay now to defend smaller agencies from the Chinese Communist Party, the bill will only get more expensive with every breach.

On the international stage, the Czech Republic’s cyber agency, NÚKIB, just rang alarm bells on the rising use of Chinese-managed technologies in hospitals, smart meters, and even electric vehicles. Their core concern? The PRC’s legal environment lets Beijing pull sensitive data from Chinese-built devices at will. They point to recent Chinese cyber campaigns, like APT31’s hit on their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a warning shot.

So what to do? U.S. agencies and expert panels are all clear on defensive measures: update firmware, close legacy ports, hunt for strange configurations, embrace zero trust, and triple-check your data flows and hardware sourcing. If you’re working with anything that touches critical infrastructure or sensitive research, now is the time to audit, patch, and train.

Listeners, thanks for tuning in to this week’s ride through China’s cyber web. Smash...