Salt Typhoon Mega-Hack: Beijing's Couch-Surfing Squatter in Your Network

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

Ting here with your Digital Dragon Watch, and trust me, the dragons have been anything but subtle this week. Let’s get straight into the world’s worst-kept secret: the Salt Typhoon mega-hack, the most ambitious China-backed cyber operation ever seen. Apparently, if you have a pulse and a U.S.-issued phone, odds are your data’s already made the one-way trip to Beijing. And yes, that includes Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance—their campaign phones reportedly pinched by Salt Typhoon’s tentacles, which investigators linked last week not just to China’s intelligence agencies, but also to at least three well-connected Chinese cybersecurity companies. The joint statement from the FBI, CISA, and no less than twenty international security services puts it bluntly: this thing hit telecoms, transportation, lodging, and even military infrastructure in more than 80 countries.

The new twist? These hackers, running software nastier than a Sichuan hotpot, aren’t satisfied with intellectual property or state secrets anymore. According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, their focus has expanded to backbone routers, including those in hotels, airports—anywhere with a juicy data stream. By leveraging provider-edge and customer-edge routers, and weaponizing compromised trusted connections, they’ve managed to burrow deep into critical infrastructure’s underbelly and establish persistent access, the kind that’s practically a couch-surfing squatter in your network.

This isn’t just a spying op. Salt Typhoon now flaunts the ability to disrupt critical utilities—think power grids and water systems—raising the stakes for disruption just when you need everything running. From Axios to The Times of India, security experts warn, “You don’t have to be a politician to make the list. If you own data, serve customers, or run services—congrats, you’re invited.”

The US government isn’t taking this lying down. CISA, under heavy political fire, is ramping up its intelligence-driven defense strategies and improving cross-sector information sharing. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is playing whack-a-mole after new revelations that Microsoft relied on China-based engineers to support SharePoint for federal agencies—including parts of Defense and Energy. Microsoft rushed out a patch in July after Chinese hackers were spotted exploiting SharePoint’s vulnerabilities, but attackers sidestepped the fix until Redmond doubled down with a stronger update.

Congress is now moving on fresh legislation to clamp down on any Pentagon-funded research with flagged Chinese entities, after an investigation found 1,400 papers—across AI, semiconductors, and hypersonics—coauthored with scientists affiliated with China’s defense sector.

So, what should everyday organizations be doing? Experts recommend treating every network edge, device, and login like it’s already compromised. Think zero trust, continuous monitoring, aggressive patching, and threat intelligence-sharing with federal partners. And seriously, if your router is older than TikTok, just recycle it.

That’s your rapid-fire round-up in the China cyber clash—thanks for tuning in to Digital Dragon Watch. Don't forget to subscribe, because in cyberspace, you want to be first to know, not last to patch. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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