04 February 2026
China's Notepad Nightmare: How a Text Editor Became Beijing's Favorite Backdoor Plus 29K Servers Screaming for Patches
Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves
About
This is your Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves podcast.
Hey listeners, Ting here, your go-to cyber sleuth with a front-row seat to China's digital shadow games. Buckle up, because the past 48 hours have been a red alert frenzy—China's hackers are probing US defenses like it's a Black Friday sale on zero-days. Let's dive into the chaos, starting with that Notepad++ supply chain nightmare Risky Business podcast unpacked yesterday.
Picture this: Chinese operatives, fresh off targeting Taiwanese bigwigs, slipped malicious code into a Notepad++ update. Boom—tens of thousands of Windows machines worldwide, including juicy US government endpoints, got backdoored. They're not smashing doors; they're surgically exfiltrating data from law enforcement agencies, per The Hacker News reports. Timeline kicks off January 31st with the tainted update drop, escalating February 2nd when CISA flashed emergency alerts for federal patching by Friday. By today, February 4th, FBI chatter confirms active exploitation, with attackers pivoting laterally via RPC flaws like CVE-2025-49760 that Microsoft just patched.
But wait, it gets spicier. Over 29,000 unpatched Exchange servers are sitting ducks online, ripe for domain compromise, as InfoSec Industry blared this morning. China's crews are chaining these with Win-DDoS tricks—turning public domain controllers into zombie botnets via RPC and LDAP. Imagine DDoSing critical infrastructure while sipping baijiu in Beijing. CISA and FBI joint bulletin at 2 PM UTC today screamed "patch now or regret," highlighting new patterns: AI-mimicking clawdbots impersonating humans to phish creds, straight out of that OpenClaw mess Risky Business roasted.
Defensive playbook? Listeners, segment your networks yesterday—enable MFA everywhere, hunt for Notepad++ anomalies with EDR tools like CrowdStrike, and rotate those RPC endpoints. SolarWinds echoes are screaming: federals, patch Ivanti EPMM and FortiCloud SSO flaws stat, per Cybersecurity Dive and Recorded Future's The Record.
Escalation scenarios? If unchecked, this morphs into hybrid hell—China proxies ransomware on US grids while US retaliates with sanctions. UK’s HM Treasury just kicked off probes into cyber sanctions breaches by financial firms, sniffing Chinese money trails. Picture Trump-era tariffs 2.0 hitting Beijing tech, sparking tit-for-tat on Taiwan Strait cables. We've seen it: from Volt Typhoon's water plant hacks to this, it's prelude to real war.
Stay vigilant, rotate keys, and air-gap the crown jewels. That's your Ting takeaway—China's not slowing; we're just catching up.
Thanks for tuning in, listeners—subscribe for daily drops to stay ahead of the breach. This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
Hey listeners, Ting here, your go-to cyber sleuth with a front-row seat to China's digital shadow games. Buckle up, because the past 48 hours have been a red alert frenzy—China's hackers are probing US defenses like it's a Black Friday sale on zero-days. Let's dive into the chaos, starting with that Notepad++ supply chain nightmare Risky Business podcast unpacked yesterday.
Picture this: Chinese operatives, fresh off targeting Taiwanese bigwigs, slipped malicious code into a Notepad++ update. Boom—tens of thousands of Windows machines worldwide, including juicy US government endpoints, got backdoored. They're not smashing doors; they're surgically exfiltrating data from law enforcement agencies, per The Hacker News reports. Timeline kicks off January 31st with the tainted update drop, escalating February 2nd when CISA flashed emergency alerts for federal patching by Friday. By today, February 4th, FBI chatter confirms active exploitation, with attackers pivoting laterally via RPC flaws like CVE-2025-49760 that Microsoft just patched.
But wait, it gets spicier. Over 29,000 unpatched Exchange servers are sitting ducks online, ripe for domain compromise, as InfoSec Industry blared this morning. China's crews are chaining these with Win-DDoS tricks—turning public domain controllers into zombie botnets via RPC and LDAP. Imagine DDoSing critical infrastructure while sipping baijiu in Beijing. CISA and FBI joint bulletin at 2 PM UTC today screamed "patch now or regret," highlighting new patterns: AI-mimicking clawdbots impersonating humans to phish creds, straight out of that OpenClaw mess Risky Business roasted.
Defensive playbook? Listeners, segment your networks yesterday—enable MFA everywhere, hunt for Notepad++ anomalies with EDR tools like CrowdStrike, and rotate those RPC endpoints. SolarWinds echoes are screaming: federals, patch Ivanti EPMM and FortiCloud SSO flaws stat, per Cybersecurity Dive and Recorded Future's The Record.
Escalation scenarios? If unchecked, this morphs into hybrid hell—China proxies ransomware on US grids while US retaliates with sanctions. UK’s HM Treasury just kicked off probes into cyber sanctions breaches by financial firms, sniffing Chinese money trails. Picture Trump-era tariffs 2.0 hitting Beijing tech, sparking tit-for-tat on Taiwan Strait cables. We've seen it: from Volt Typhoon's water plant hacks to this, it's prelude to real war.
Stay vigilant, rotate keys, and air-gap the crown jewels. That's your Ting takeaway—China's not slowing; we're just catching up.
Thanks for tuning in, listeners—subscribe for daily drops to stay ahead of the breach. This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI