Silk & Salt Typhoons: Beijing's Cyber Storms Wreak Global Havoc - US Routers Rocked in 72-Hour Hacking Spree!

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

It’s Ting here, and let’s not sugarcoat it – the last 72 hours in US-China cyberland have been an absolute roller coaster. If you thought summer was hot, it’s nothing compared to the swarm of Chinese state-sponsored bits ricocheting through American infrastructure this week. Grab a drink, listeners – you’re going to want your hands free for facepalming.

The timeline kicked off Monday night, August 25th, when Salt Typhoon, China’s cyber marauders with a penchant for router infiltration, popped up on CISA’s radar yet again. Just after midnight, backbone routers at three different US telecommunications providers experienced unexplained surges in admin-level credential sniffing, and within hours, network traffic logs revealed targeted decryption efforts. By dawn, the FBI and NSA were comparing notes with global partners: the breach patterns matched years of Beijing-backed activity, with stolen data showing telltale signs of staging for further exfiltration, not just domestically but across five continents, 80-plus countries, and well over 200 US organizations. Talk about not playing favorites – Brett Leatherman from the FBI called it “indiscriminate targeting… in ways that go well outside the norms of cyberspace operations.” That’s cyber-diplospeak for “they went everywhere, touched everything.”

As the clock ticked into Tuesday, August 26th, CISA escalated its emergency alert, urging agencies to patch an arbitrary file write vulnerability in Git rapid-fire style, after seeing exploit attempts spike on federal networks. At least three sensitive systems required emergency downtime, with activity traced to actors tooling with infrastructure from Sichuan Juxinhe in China and their industry comrades at Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong. These companies, now infamous, allegedly funnel their hacks as a service for the People’s Liberation Army’s intelligence wing. If your routers had a pulse, they were a target – with entire edge network stacks getting “modified” to maintain long-term access. That means they’re not just getting in; they’re making themselves a new home.

Fast forward to this morning, August 27th, and the hits kept coming. Silk Typhoon, probably bored without any US government emails to peek into for breakfast, pivoted to hijacking web traffic intended for US-based diplomats by redirecting through malicious domains. The twist: this latest campaign leveraged zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities, according to CrowdStrike, bypassing standard endpoint detection to install fresh malware strains. The focus? Communications, location tracking, and – always the crowd-pleaser – credential theft.

So what should defenders do besides panic-scroll? CISA and FBI say patch those edge routers and Git servers if you haven’t already, turn on centralized logging like your network depends on it (because it does), and start threat hunting for signs of persistence – especially for signatures linked to Salt Typhoon, Silk Typhoon, RedMike, and operator PANDA. With adversarial actors burrowed deep into hardware, every lag or odd spike is a red flag.

Potential escalation scenario? Don’t rule out disruptive attacks on US transport systems or even public safety networks if access persists into September. With US allies – from Five Eyes to Germany and Japan – shouting from the rooftops, it’s clear nobody’s safe. And if Beijing decides to up the ante, we could see supply chains and financial networks next in line.

That’s the cyber drama as of August 27th, 2025. I’m Ting. Thanks for tuning in, listeners. Subscribe for more cyber scoops, and remember: only you can prevent router-flavored espionage. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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