Murky Panda Mayhem: Chinas Cyber Rampage Leaves US Scrambling for Patches and Prayers

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

I’m Ting, and the cyber threat level is neon red with a splash of murky panda prints. Let’s get straight to what you missed these dizzying past few days in US-China cyber jousting. Grab your password managers, listeners, because this isn’t just theory—it’s the reality behind today’s Red Alert.

Let’s start with the latest headline-grabber: Murky Panda, also called Silk Typhoon (and for those keeping track, formerly Hafnium). This crew is why cloud administrators haven’t slept much lately. CrowdStrike reports a 136% surge in cloud intrusions, much of it thanks to these China-nexus operatives who love to break into government, tech, and academic systems. The favorite move? Weaponizing n-day and zero-day vulnerabilities. They recently hammered Citrix NetScaler (see that CVE-2023-3519) and exploited the just-patched Commvault bug (CVE-2025-3928), slicing straight into backup systems that are supposed to be everyone’s safety net.

By Monday evening, August 18, Silk Typhoon upped their game. They exploited trusted relationships within cloud ecosystems, using compromised Entra ID service principals and sneaking through delegated permissions, turning your single sign-on paradise into a hacker’s carnival. In one infamous case, they stole an application registration secret from a SaaS provider, letting them slip into customer environments with far too much ease.

Down the timeline, Tuesday saw the group leveraging small office and home office (SOHO) routers in the US as jump points. This made it look like the attacks were originating locally—classic disinformation play. By Wednesday, CISA was lighting up inboxes with emergency alerts. A major industry SaaS provider suffered a breach, and downstream customers scrambled to audit every Entra ID integration and multi-cloud handoff. Even the FBI weighed in urging a full-court press on patching Citrix and Commvault instances, as well as anything remotely public-facing or connected to supply chain vendors.

What’s the risk if these activities escalate? As DCSA Director David Cattler pointed out at the recent National Insider Threat Awareness Month conference, China isn’t just playing at cyber: they’re waging strategic espionage as fast as our sunbaked policies can’t adapt. We’ve already seen the Volt Typhoon campaign hammer US infrastructure, and the December Treasury Department hack, where Chinese actors walked off with thousands of files.

So here’s what you need to do, and do it now: Patrol your cloud configurations. If you’re a systems administrator, you must patch Citrix and Commvault, and enable multi-factor authentication on every sensitive identity. Review delegation relationships—don’t assume the trusted SaaS vendor didn’t get popped over the weekend. Keep regular, offline backups and be alert to phishing and credential-stuffing blitzes. Don’t forget about those aging routers—just because they’re ugly doesn’t mean Murky Panda won’t put them to work.

Listeners, thanks for tuning into my whirlwind update of China’s latest cyber chess moves against US targets. Patch fast, question trust, and keep those coffee cups full—because the alerts are just getting started. Please subscribe to stay ahead of the breach. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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