Salt Typhoon Mega-Hack Fries US Telecoms as China Plays Cyber Chess with DC Secrets

This is your Tech Shield: US vs China Updates podcast.

Listeners, strap in—this is Ting, your cyber confidante, with the latest on Tech Shield: US vs China. No time for formalities; let’s dive right into the volatility of the last few days, which has been enough to fry even a quantum processor.

First up, the Salt Typhoon mega-attack that’s got DC in red alert. Let’s be blunt: Chinese hackers infiltrated US telecoms and, thanks to wiretapping-friendly infrastructure originally designed for domestic law enforcement (thank you, CALEA), these hackers managed to rummage through databases of wiretap targets, exposing both US operations and foreign spies under surveillance. Dr. Susan Landau at Tufts compared it to a “Kim Philby-level catastrophe.” That’s right, the Chinese state knows who the US is tracking—Russians, Iranians, even their own operatives. It’s like playing chess when your opponent sees your hand and board.

The government didn’t wait for the dust to settle. Four out of the Five Eyes—US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—put their signature on an urgent advisory to use end-to-end encryption, flipping the usual FBI resistance to encryption on its head. The UK went rogue with its Technical Capability Notice approach. The policy whiplash here is palpable, and the adversaries are certainly watching.

On the patch front, Microsoft scrambled this week to address not one but two SharePoint Server flaws, CVE-2025-49704 and CVE-2025-49706, both leveraged to drop custom DNS-controlled AK47 C2 backdoors, courtesy of China-linked threat actors. If that acronym salad wasn’t enough, consider this: industry reports say the attack closely mirrors the 2021 Exchange debacle. Clearly, lessons learned were… not learned.

Meanwhile, CISA is throwing nearly $100 million in cyber grants at state and local agencies for upgrades, and DARPA is betting on AI with seven teams at DEF CON gearing up to find and patch open-source vulnerabilities before Beijing’s offensive teams can exploit them. Speaking of open source, a Strider Technologies expose this week found that Chinese, Russian, and North Korean operatives are trying to plant backdoors in the global open-source ecosystem—sneaky, subtle, and much harder to trace than big splashy attacks.

Not to be outdone, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) accused the US of sliding tracking backdoors into NVIDIA’s H20 chips with plans for remote shutdowns. They also claimed US teams rode a Microsoft zero-day into a major Chinese military enterprise in 2022. This tit-for-tat dance is getting more intricate than TikTok algorithms.

Is this enough? Experts like Landau say US defensive measures are lagging behind the level of embedded risk. Mandated backdoors for oversight sound great on Capitol Hill but leave Swiss cheese holes for adversaries. End-to-end encryption advisories are a positive shift, and the investment in autonomous AI for patching gives hope, but the looming threat hanging over ubiquitous open-source platforms is like using antivirus on a submarine leak.

That’s the high-speed download for this week on Tech Shield: US vs China. Thanks for tuning in—don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a breach, a patch, or a witty Ting zinger. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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