Tantalizing Tales: China's Cyber Secrets Spilled! Volt Typhoon Shockwaves and Salt Typhoon's Telecom Tango

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

*[Static crackles, then a confident voice begins]*

Hey there, tech defenders! Ting here with your weekly dive into the digital dance between dragons and eagles. It's May 10th, and China's cyber footprint keeps expanding faster than my collection of mechanical keyboards.

Let me cut to the chase – big news dropped on April 11th when The Wall Street Journal revealed something jaw-dropping: Chinese officials actually admitted to conducting the notorious Volt Typhoon attacks during a secret Geneva meeting last December. According to insiders, the admission was their way of warning the US to back off from Taiwan. These attacks penetrated multiple critical infrastructure sectors, with hackers dwelling in the US electric grid for a staggering 300 days in 2023.

Meanwhile, the Cyberspace Administration of China has been busy on their end. Just over a month ago, on March 28th, they issued draft amendments to their Cybersecurity Law for public comment. This is the second round of revisions, signaling China's continued regulatory tightening in the digital realm.

The threat group Salt Typhoon (also known as "RedMike" to some researchers) has been particularly active. Between December and January, they targeted over 1,000 unpatched Cisco edge devices globally. Recorded Future's Insikt Group discovered they successfully compromised five telecom providers, including two based in the United States. Their weapon of choice? CVE-2023-20198 and CVE-2023-20273 – privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS XE software that were zero-days back in October 2023.

They didn't stop at telecoms either. Universities were in their crosshairs too – UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Utah Tech, and Cal State all saw targeting activity.

The bigger picture is honestly alarming. Chinese cyber espionage operations surged by a massive 150% overall in 2024, with some sectors like financial, media, and manufacturing seeing spikes of up to 300%.

In a creative twist of tradecraft, March saw Chinese operatives using fake recruitment ads to target recently laid-off US federal workers – classic human engineering meets cyber espionage.

For protection, experts recommend prioritizing patching of edge devices, implementing zero-trust architecture, and conducting regular threat hunting specifically looking for the TTPs associated with these China-nexus groups. Remember that they're increasingly using legitimate cloud services like Dropbox for command and control, making detection trickier.

That's all for this week's Digital Dragon Watch. Stay vigilant, patch religiously, and remember – in cyberspace, the Great Wall is actually made of code. This is Ting, signing off!

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