Chinas Renting Your Neighbors Stairwell: Telco Hacks, Minus-One-Day Exploits and AI Disinfo Flooding 180 Platforms Titelbild

Chinas Renting Your Neighbors Stairwell: Telco Hacks, Minus-One-Day Exploits and AI Disinfo Flooding 180 Platforms

Chinas Renting Your Neighbors Stairwell: Telco Hacks, Minus-One-Day Exploits and AI Disinfo Flooding 180 Platforms

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 This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.

I’m Ting, your Cyber Sentinel on Beijing Watch, so let’s jack straight into this week’s China–US cyber chessboard.

Across the wire, analysts at SecurityAffairs report that a China-linked group tagged UAT-7290 has been quietly burrowing into telecom networks from South Asia to Southeastern Europe since 2022, using custom tools like RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid. That may sound far away, but when you’re owning telcos, you’re building the ideal staging ground to pivot into U.S. traffic, roaming users, and global backbone routes. Think of it as Beijing renting the stairwell in your neighbor’s building so they can watch your front door.

On the tradecraft side, Chinese-speaking operators were also caught using a hacked SonicWall VPN as a beachhead to deploy a VMware ESXi exploit chain that researchers say was likely active more than a year before disclosure, again according to SecurityAffairs. That’s the worrying part: not just zero-day, but “minus-one-day” capability—meaning they’re stockpiling and operationalizing bugs long before vendors even know to panic. For U.S. critical infrastructure that leans on the same virtualized stacks, that’s a quiet red alert.

Zoom out to cognitive warfare. Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, cited by the Taipei Times, details how the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of State Security, and the People’s Liberation Army Cyberspace Force are running a government–civilian partnership: IT companies, content farms, and botnets pumping AI-generated disinformation in more than 20 languages across 180-plus platforms. The immediate target is Taiwan, but the narratives—undermining trust in the U.S. military, questioning alliance reliability—land right in Washington’s strategic backyard.

Internationally, Beijing is not just on defense. Militarnyi reports that China’s Ministry of State Security publicly accused the United States of hacking its National Time Synchronization Center, calling it an attack on critical infrastructure. That’s classic information-ops judo: even as Western agencies expose China-linked APT campaigns, Beijing frames itself as the true victim, shaping opinion in the Global South and creating diplomatic cover for its own operations.

So, what should U.S. defenders actually do this week, not in some 2030 strategy slide? First, harden VPNs and virtualization stacks: strict patch SLAs, out-of-band monitoring of management interfaces, and behavioral analytics tuned to east–west traffic inside data centers. Second, for telecoms and cloud providers, treat persistent, low-and-slow lateral movement as the default threat model, not the edge case. Third, fuse cyber defense with influence ops: agencies and platforms should be pre-baking playbooks for rapidly debunking AI-crafted narratives seeded by coordinated botnets, taking a page from how Taiwan’s NSB works with fact-checkers and social platforms in near real time, as described by the Taipei Times.

Strategically, here’s the punchline: China is pairing technical intrusions against infrastructure with AI-accelerated manipulation campaigns aimed at the political will to respond. If you only patch servers and ignore minds, you lose.

Thanks for tuning in, listeners—don’t forget to subscribe for your next dose of Ting’s China cyber briefings. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

For more http://www.quietplease.ai


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