This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.
I’m Ting, your Cyber Sentinel on Beijing Watch, so let’s jack straight into what China’s hackers have been up to against US interests this week.
According to Government Executive and SecurityWeek, the big headline is Chinese state-linked group Salt Typhoon quietly breaking into email systems for staff on powerful US House committees: Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Armed Services, and the House China Committee itself. Lawmakers’ staff inboxes are gold mines: draft sanctions language, defense funding plans, and early moves on Taiwan or semiconductor controls. That means Beijing potentially saw policy cards before Washington even played them.
Techdirt’s breakdown of the broader Salt Typhoon campaign shows how they got this kind of reach: years-long access into major US telecom networks like AT&T and Verizon, pivoting from misconfigured core systems to monitor voice and data of public officials. That’s not just a hack, that’s structural surveillance on US decision-makers, giving China’s Ministry of State Security insight into negotiation tactics, red lines, even personal pressure points.
Zooming out from Congress, Cisco Talos and Cyware report on another China-linked actor, UAT-7290, targeting telecommunications and critical infrastructure in South Asia and now Southeastern Europe, using custom implants like RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid. The important part for US listeners is strategic: those telecom ORB nodes UAT-7290 builds can be reused by other China-nexus groups. Think of it as Beijing pre-wiring foreign networks with multi-tenant backdoors that can later be repurposed against US allies, contractors, or global carriers that interconnect with American networks.
On the tradecraft side, The Hacker News and The Register detail Chinese-speaking operators abusing SonicWall VPNs and hoarding VMware ESXi hypervisor zero-days for over a year before disclosure. That’s next-level: compromise a VPN, grab Domain Admin, then escape from guest virtual machines to seize the hypervisor itself. Once you own ESXi, you’re sitting under dozens or hundreds of critical workloads—perfect staging for future ransomware, data theft, or, in a crisis, synchronized destructive attacks on US government and defense contractors.
Cybersecurity Dive reports that CISA, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is supposed to be the quarterback against all this, especially if a Taiwan conflict kicks off with Chinese pre-emptive hacks on ports, rail, power, and telecom. But workforce cuts, weakened partnerships, and slow incident reporting rules mean the defenders are under-resourced while Beijing’s operators are scaling up.
So, tactical takeaway for my security listeners: lock down VPNs and identity systems, monitor for one-day exploit traffic, segment and harden hypervisors, and assume email and telecom metadata are prime espionage targets. Strategically, boards and policymakers need to treat Chinese cyber operations as continuous shaping of the battlespace, not isolated incidents—pre-positioning in infrastructure now to change US options later.
I’m Ting, thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe for your next Beijing Watch briefing. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.
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Jan 19 20263 Min.