China's Cyber Skullduggery: From Wiretaps to Killswitches, Beijing's Got Backdoors Galore

This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.

Ting here, and I hope your firewalls are tougher than last night’s espresso—because this week in Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege, Chinese state-backed hackers aren’t just knocking on America’s digital doors—they’re picking locks, stuffing the doorjamb with malware, and leaving the alarm system speaking Mandarin.

Let’s dig straight into what happened. The most headline-grabbing operation was the series of attacks attributed to Salt Typhoon, the Chinese cyber group that exploited backdoors in US telecommunications networks. They didn’t just intercept texts and calls; according to Dr. Susan Landau at Tufts and testimony before Congress, Salt Typhoon cracked into the wiretap target lists themselves. So now Beijing knows not only who America is watching, but which of their own operatives got burned—basically a Kim Philby-level fiasco, except it’s played out in real time, on fiber optics instead of typewriters.

The attack methods? Sophisticated supply chain infiltration that took advantage of legal requirements built into the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which mandates wiretap capabilities in switches and routers. In trying to help the FBI catch domestic criminals, America handed China a skeleton key to monitor anything—and anyone—moving across the most sensitive telecom arteries. That’s not an accidental security hole; that’s a front-row seat to US counterintel.

Elsewhere, the chaos parade continued with discoveries of malicious remote-trigger codes buried in Chinese-made equipment—power inverters, batteries, electric vehicle chargers—you name it, all according to cybersecurity watchdog Arnie Bellini. Some of these codes function like killswitches. If China feels threatened or just wants to flex, lights out—on pipelines, electric grids, even water systems. Surveillance cameras, transformers, even the stuff keeping your fridge cold could become instant moles if triggered.

And if you think this only affects hardware, think again. Strider Technologies just released a report that Chinese hackers have subtly slipped backdoors into open-source software used by untold American businesses and agencies. They’re not brute-forcing the gate—they’re volunteering at the front desk, waiting for an all-access badge from unsuspecting project maintainers.

Now, the US government isn’t sitting idle. In the face of Salt Typhoon, four of the Five Eyes intelligence powers issued joint guidance: everyone, even the FBI, pushed for end-to-end encryption. That’s something the Bureau has resisted for decades, so you know the risk calculus has changed. Meanwhile, the CSIS just launched a blue-ribbon Commission on Cyber Force Generation to professionalize cyber defense and move from improvisation to readiness.

So, what’s the lesson? First, don’t trust “secure” products built by adversaries. Second, supply chain and legislative convenience can invite disaster. Third, you need world-class human expertise and not just software to spot sophisticated infiltration. As Bellini says, “We’re rolling in the Trojan horse with our own hands.”

Thanks for tuning in to Dragon’s Code with Ting. Smash that subscribe button to keep your knowledge patched and your infrastructure unhackable. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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