US Cyber Defenses Scramble as China Hacks into Overdrive: Pentagon Grants Fuel the Fire

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

No fluff, straight to the pulse: This week in the wild world of US cyber defense versus China, the plot thickened faster than a zero-day exploit. I’m Ting—cyber sleuth, China watcher, and your virtual caffeine shot for all things hacking. So, let’s dive right into the digital trenches.

After last week’s global fireworks, US agencies cranked up awareness on Chinese state-sponsored groups like Salt Typhoon, Operator Panda, GhostEmperor, and RedMike. According to the new joint advisory from the National Security Agency and its international partners, these threat actors aren’t just fancy names—they’re actively tunneling through telecom, transportation, government, and even lodging systems. Most notably, the Salt Typhoon campaign got the spotlight, for being the most ambitious to date: China’s hackers reportedly compromised telecom networks, aiming to surveil pretty much everyone, not just the headliners like President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, but also millions of regular folks. The FBI sent out warnings, but honestly, they admitted they couldn’t even alert all the affected parties. It’s the cyber equivalent of yelling into a hurricane.

For those who like a firewall with their coffee, new government advisories urged immediate patching of known vulnerabilities and stricter edge-device controls. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) rolled out an OT asset visibility playbook, pushing critical infrastructure operators to map out everything—because you can’t defend what you don’t even know exists. Tenable’s snapshot emphasized bolstering OT, ICS, and IoT protections, radical log centralization, and not treating old bugs like vintage wine—patch ‘em now.

Meanwhile, the US government dropped some spicy news via a House report: Over $2.5 billion in Pentagon grants funded joint research with Chinese universities blacklisted for links to China’s defense industry. More than 1,400 papers birthed from these collabs between June 2023 and June 2025 raised eyebrows, especially when many topics involved AI, hypersonics, and semiconductors. The congressional committee’s fix? Ban defense grants to any project tangled up with China’s defense sector. As Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent put it, these findings reveal huge gaps in the way federally funded research is protected on US campuses.

Industry isn’t letting government have all the fun. Some US universities are rapidly shutting down joint programs with Chinese peers, especially where military relevance is sniffed out. Businesses too are being told, “You’re all in this DSP now”—that’s the Data Security Program, fresh from the DOJ. If you’re handling any data with even a whiff of international traffic, you better have your compliance game sharp, audits ready, and reporting systems tight. The grace period ended July 8, and the penalty hammer drops October 6.

As for emerging defensive tech, drone-mothership spectacles like China’s Jiu Tian and the Robot Wolf ground system have forced US strategists to rethink their love of drone “hellscapes”—turns out, China was more ready for unmanned warfare than expected. And despite US cyber tools still being sharp, as CSIS noted, the giant attack surface and hesitations in retaliatory policies make the system’s armor patchy at best.

To wrap up with some expert flavor: The new measures—patching, visibility, stricter partnerships—are all necessary steps. But until we bridge private-sector gaps, monitor research flows like hawks, and invest in next-gen detection for both hardware and human vulnerabilities, we’re mostly playing catch-up. The adversaries aren’t waiting. Neither should we.

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