Cyber Siren: Pentagon Foxes, Salt Typhoons Fury, and Telecom Tremors - Your Weekly Dose of Cyber Chaos!

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

I’m Ting, your tech-savvy China cyber-watcher, and today is July 16th, 2025—trust me, you’ll want to turn up the volume for this update! Let’s get straight to the action: In the last 72 hours, the number-one red alert is Salt Typhoon, the Chinese state-backed hacking collective, grabbing headlines—again. Just confirmed by the Department of Defense, Salt Typhoon pulled off a stealthy, nine-month infiltration of a U.S. state’s Army National Guard network. They snuck in somewhere in March 2024 and by December, they’d mapped topologies, filched PII on Guard members, and diagrammed out network architectures so granularly it’s like they drew us a blueprint for our own cyber disaster, all by leveraging old misconfigured edge devices—the usual suspects from Cisco and Palo Alto.

A National Guard spokesperson admits the breach didn’t disrupt core missions, but the feds are still digging through forensic breadcrumbs to see how deep the persistence runs and if rootkits or backdoors got left behind. DHS, reviewing Pentagon memos, warns that the stolen reconnaissance data could lead to spear-phishing and even supply-chain attacks targeting at least 14 other states, especially those hooked up to fusion centers and law enforcement. Picture this: a single Guard network popped open like a can, and now all their lateral federal-state links are juicy targets for follow-on strikes.

Meanwhile, the cyber frontlines are getting hammered from multiple angles. According to CyberHub Podcast, while Salt Typhoon scored, NSA and FBI successfully repelled Volt Typhoon’s gambit to pre-position in U.S. critical infrastructure—think Guam, power, telecom—likely to play spoiler if Taiwan suddenly flares. So, small win for defenders, but proof that Beijing wants hands on every kill switch they can reach, and not just empty threats; these are greenlit operations straight from the top.

Critical infrastructure’s jittery, with hacktivists upping their ICS and data breach game, according to new Cyble data. Telecom? Still reeling. Ericsson is turbo-charging defenses to align with CISA guidance after those AT&T and Verizon breaches surfacing last winter. Senator Maria Cantwell wants answers fast, pushing for clarity on the scope of the Chinese infiltration.

For tech teams listening, if Chrome isn’t patched for CVE-2025-6558 by now, you’re rolling the dice. Edge device audits are urgent—especially if you run Cisco or Palo Alto kit. AI threat hunting isn’t hype anymore; tools like Bixleap are fighting zero-days before they even happen. And for everyone in telecom: segment those systems, review logs for unauthorized access, and lock down your OT and ICS right now.

One final facepalm: ProPublica just exposed that the Pentagon, despite warnings from both Microsoft staff and national security advisors, approved China-based engineers onto U.S. military clouds, under a so-called ‘digital escort’ model. Turns out, many “escorts” monitoring these engineers lacked the chops to spot sneaky code, leaving sensitive operations dangerously exposed. It’s like giving a fox a badge and the hens a flashlight.

If escalation continues at this pace, with smarter malware like HazyBeacon sneaking around in cloud traffic and exploiting zero-days, plus potential supply-chain backdoors from proposed (but flawed) U.S. chip-tracking laws, we’re not just looking at isolated breaches—it’s systemic risk.

Thanks for tuning in, fellow cyber sentinels. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any firewalls getting torched tomorrow. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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