01 February 2026
Ting Spills the Tea: Chinas Cyber Squatters Crashing Uncle Sams Grid Party with AI Typhoons and Botnet Drama
Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves
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This is your Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves podcast.
Hey listeners, it's Ting here, your go-to gal for all things China cyber chaos—witty, wired, and watching the wires like a hawk on Red Bull. Buckle up, because the past few days have been a non-stop ping-pong of probes from Beijing's hackers straight at Uncle Sam's jugular. We're talking Red Alert level, with Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon burrowing deeper into US telecoms, power grids, and even Pentagon lines, living off the land like sneaky digital squatters.
Flash back to December 2025: Chinese state-sponsored crews punched into the US Treasury's sanctions and economic intel offices, per Inside Telecom reports—shifting from spy games to strategic squatting for future fireworks. Fast-forward to this week, ending February 1st, 2026, and the Pentagon just dropped Cybercom 2.0, their shiny new force overhaul. Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman, acting Cyber Command boss and NSA director, spilled it: "The Chinese execute deliberate campaigns compromising US networks, using native commands to masquerade as legit traffic." That's Typhoon ops in action—Volt Typhoon embedding in energy, water, transport; Salt Typhoon slurping telecom surveillance. Katie Sutton, assistant cyber policy secretary, greenlit this pivot to "engaged persistence," hunting foes with AI sifting data so analysts pounce faster.
CISA's been blaring alerts too—added Ivanti EPMM's CVE-2026-1281 code injection (CVSS 9.8) and Fortinet's FortiCloud SSO bypass CVE-2026-24858 to their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog just days ago, confirming active exploits. Google Threat Intelligence nuked IPIDEA, a China-based proxy botnet with millions of devices, slashing it by 40% via legal takedowns with Cloudflare and Lumen's Black Lotus Labs. That's no coincidence amid Salt Typhoon's telecom tango.
Timeline? October 2025, Auburn's McCrary Institute flagged China's seafloor mapping in South China Sea and Arctic with drones—priming subs to snap US undersea cables and sensors, feeding cyber targeting. By late January 2026, CISA piled on with Linux kernel overflows and SmarterMail flaws. FBI's Operation Winter SHIELD dropped 10 defenses this week: phish-resistant auth, vuln management, ditch end-of-life gear, third-party checks—born from nation-state probes.
Defensive playbook, listeners: Patch Fortinet, Ivanti now; hunt insider threats with CISA's fresh guide; deploy AI-driven anomaly detection; ban Chinese supply chain junk per DoD scrutiny. Escalation? If Taiwan tensions spike, these footholds flip to wipers blacking out grids mid-crisis, or spoofed commands scrambling military sats and GPS. Beijing's playing long game for digital dominance; we're scrambling shields.
Thanks for tuning in, listeners—subscribe for more cyber spice! 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, it's Ting here, your go-to gal for all things China cyber chaos—witty, wired, and watching the wires like a hawk on Red Bull. Buckle up, because the past few days have been a non-stop ping-pong of probes from Beijing's hackers straight at Uncle Sam's jugular. We're talking Red Alert level, with Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon burrowing deeper into US telecoms, power grids, and even Pentagon lines, living off the land like sneaky digital squatters.
Flash back to December 2025: Chinese state-sponsored crews punched into the US Treasury's sanctions and economic intel offices, per Inside Telecom reports—shifting from spy games to strategic squatting for future fireworks. Fast-forward to this week, ending February 1st, 2026, and the Pentagon just dropped Cybercom 2.0, their shiny new force overhaul. Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman, acting Cyber Command boss and NSA director, spilled it: "The Chinese execute deliberate campaigns compromising US networks, using native commands to masquerade as legit traffic." That's Typhoon ops in action—Volt Typhoon embedding in energy, water, transport; Salt Typhoon slurping telecom surveillance. Katie Sutton, assistant cyber policy secretary, greenlit this pivot to "engaged persistence," hunting foes with AI sifting data so analysts pounce faster.
CISA's been blaring alerts too—added Ivanti EPMM's CVE-2026-1281 code injection (CVSS 9.8) and Fortinet's FortiCloud SSO bypass CVE-2026-24858 to their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog just days ago, confirming active exploits. Google Threat Intelligence nuked IPIDEA, a China-based proxy botnet with millions of devices, slashing it by 40% via legal takedowns with Cloudflare and Lumen's Black Lotus Labs. That's no coincidence amid Salt Typhoon's telecom tango.
Timeline? October 2025, Auburn's McCrary Institute flagged China's seafloor mapping in South China Sea and Arctic with drones—priming subs to snap US undersea cables and sensors, feeding cyber targeting. By late January 2026, CISA piled on with Linux kernel overflows and SmarterMail flaws. FBI's Operation Winter SHIELD dropped 10 defenses this week: phish-resistant auth, vuln management, ditch end-of-life gear, third-party checks—born from nation-state probes.
Defensive playbook, listeners: Patch Fortinet, Ivanti now; hunt insider threats with CISA's fresh guide; deploy AI-driven anomaly detection; ban Chinese supply chain junk per DoD scrutiny. Escalation? If Taiwan tensions spike, these footholds flip to wipers blacking out grids mid-crisis, or spoofed commands scrambling military sats and GPS. Beijing's playing long game for digital dominance; we're scrambling shields.
Thanks for tuning in, listeners—subscribe for more cyber spice! 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