China's Hacker Typhoons Wreaking Havoc on US Military Digital Storm Incoming

This is your Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here—the cyber-whisperer who makes sense of China's digital storms even when most folks are still rebooting their routers. You caught me right after another wild few days—in fact, let’s call it a Red Alert. If you use any kind of interconnected tech in the U.S., you should probably lean in.

Let’s start with Salt Typhoon, the Chinese hackers making headlines again. Just today, the NSA, CISA, and FBI released an emergency alert after discovering that Salt Typhoon had breached U.S. Army National Guard networks. According to joint reports, this crew has been running an enormous campaign, not just against the military but also against telecommunications giants, internet service providers, and state government agencies. If you’re guessing it’s a smash-and-grab operation just for data, guess again—Salt Typhoon plants digital trapdoors that Beijing could use for sabotage down the road.

Here’s the timeline: On August 29th, security teams noticed strange shellcode launching in state infrastructure. By August 31st, Citrix NetScaler vulnerabilities were being actively exploited—Shadowserver Foundation flagged around 28,200 systems still exposed. This morning—September 1st—a burst of Emergency Directives hit inboxes at hundreds of U.S. agencies, with CISA and FBI urging admins to patch and isolate compromised gateways, and to treat all OAuth tokens as potentially stolen, thanks to the linked Salesloft/Drift AI chat breach. Google and Mandiant have tied some of this campaign to UNC6395, not your average script kiddies but a highly organized bunch utilizing advanced zero-click exploits.

Salt Typhoon isn’t alone, though. Volt Typhoon and Flax Typhoon are running parallel ops, targeting everything from presidential candidate communications to state-level cyber personnel records. The scale? Think coordinated, systematic, and global—Australia, Canada, the UK, Taiwan, you name it.

What’s new about these attacks? Social manipulation and custom malware, yes, but this time, stealthy network hijacking is paired with AI-generated malicious scripts. Security firm ESET even found PromptLock ransomware leveraging OpenAI’s gpt-oss:20b for rapid code development. Welcome to the era of AI-powered cybercrime.

CISA’s advised these immediate defenses: patch all Citrix gateways ASAP; rotate credentials, especially OAuth tokens; isolate legacy network segments; ensure multifactor authentication is not being bypassed (watch for MFA bombing!); and crank up network monitoring for any sign of lateral movement. Don’t forget, with Mustang Panda-linked actors exploiting public WiFi in hotels to snare U.S. and Southeast Asian diplomats, personal caution extends far beyond your office.

Potential escalation? If Beijing leverages the data from Army National Guard access—cyber defense postures, personnel PII—future campaigns could go deep, not just into sabotage but into manipulating response strategies during actual crises.

That’s the rundown, straight from the digital frontlines. Major names in play—Salt Typhoon, Mustang Panda, UNC6395, Volt Typhoon—and the game isn’t slowing down. Patch, monitor, rotate, repeat.

Thanks for tuning in, subscribe for more updates—this has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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