Xu Zewei Busted in Milan! Murky Panda Strikes Again - Silicon Siege Ep 27 with Ting

This is your Silicon Siege: China's Tech Offensive podcast.

Silicon Siege is here, I’m Ting, and the last two weeks have been an all-out cyber-thriller between Beijing and Silicon Valley. You want cyber-ops drama, high-stakes espionage, and the future of chips and hacks? Let’s sidestep the pleasantries and jack right in.

First, let’s talk industrial espionage, because wow—August has been a busy month. Case in point: the fresh unsealing of indictments against Xu Zewei and Zhang Yu. These aren’t random script kiddies in a basement. Xu ran IT at Shanghai Powerock Network, allegedly coordinating hacks on U.S. universities—yes, even virology labs, because that “HAFNIUM” campaign from 2021 has legs and it’s still coming back around like Windows updates at 2am. Xu was nabbed in Milan just last month, which by cyber-espionage standards is practically live-streaming your arrest. And these guys didn’t just target academics—they were caught lifting secrets wholesale, exploiting Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, and using every bit of Chinese private enterprise plausible deniability to hide behind state sponsorship, says the Department of Justice.

But it’s not just paper-pushing academics in the crosshairs. Two more—Yuance Chen and Liren “Ryan” Lai—are now facing charges for trying to infiltrate U.S. Navy facilities. Lai reportedly clocked in with a visitor visa, hired a local asset, and handed over Navy base tour footage and even tried to get cozy with personnel aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. It reads like a spy movie, but Attorney General Pamela Bondi made it clear—it’s China’s “sustained and aggressive” drive to infiltrate our military and supply lines. And yes, there was literally a suitcase with $10,000 in a California locker. James Bond would be proud.

Hacks aren’t just going for the crown jewels. According to CrowdStrike, Murky Panda—aka Silk Typhoon—has been leveraging N-day and zero-day vulnerabilities. They exploited Citrix and Commvault appliances this month to deploy "CloudedHope" malware, popping into cloud networks and making persistence look easy. Supply chain attacks? That’s their special. They’ve hit targets from software vendors to professional services, turning even small business routers into their own little Great Firewall.

And supply chain battles are getting geopolitical. Look at Apple: Foxconn had to recall 300 engineers from India because of pressure from Beijing, according to South China Morning Post. That kind of move sends shudders down the global gadget assembly line. And in chip wars, NVIDIA just got its custom “H20” AI chips for China yanked off the table after regulators in Beijing told ByteDance and Tencent to stop buying, say reports from The Information and Financial Times—ostensibly because of security “backdoors” but in reality because, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick drilled, “We don’t sell them our best stuff—not even our third-best.” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang insists there are no backdoors, hinting a new chip might be in the works for China, but the standoff is only getting icier.

On the strategic front, DCSA Director William Cattler says that it’s a new world of "cyber-enabled espionage" fueled by AI-driven targeting, and U.S. cleared industry now reports 65,000 phishing attempts a month from China alone. AI infrastructure, IP around chips, and even training data itself—everything’s on the menu for cyber-enabled economic warfare.

Experts agree the pattern is sharpening: Chinese cyber ops are evolving, increasingly blending classic intellectual property theft, insider recruitment, supply chain compromise, and strategic military infiltration. The future? As analyst Eric Byers puts it, chip war is the new space race, and both sides are ramping up for a long haul. My advice, dear listeners? Patch relentlessly, train your people, and triple-check who’s got hands on your code.

Thanks for tuning in to Silicon...