Cyber Smackdown: China's Firewall Leaks, Feds Flag Surge in Hacks, and AI Turns Rogue!

This is your Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves podcast.

Listeners, Ting here, your resident cyber oracle with a penchant for zero-days and very strong coffee. If your phone’s pinged more alerts than a New York crosswalk today, it’s not a drill — this is Red Alert: China’s Daily Cyber Moves, and oh, what a Monday it’s been.

Right at sunrise, the first big shockwave: over 500GB of internal documents from China’s infamous Great Firewall leaked online, bringing with it not just dense code but actual project management logs from Fang Binxing’s Geedge Networks, aka "the Father of the Great Firewall." This is the largest-ever breach of Beijing’s censorship playbook, and the significance is jaw-dropping. Security researchers are still combing through it, but the early consensus — including teams at Net4People and GFW Report — is that China’s digital firewall and surveillance tech not only monitors its own citizens but is exported everywhere from Kazakhstan and Myanmar to Ethiopia. Even Belt and Road partners get a taste, whether they like it or not. The diplomatic fallout is coming, trust me.

Now for the people who like their cyber with a side of operational danger: late last night, CISA and the FBI fired off joint emergency bulletins to U.S. critical infrastructure ops and cloud providers. They’re flagging a surge in Salt Typhoon group attacks, the same crew formerly pegged as regular spies, now escalating to full-on disruptive campaigns. Recent patterns? It’s not just government servers — now it’s telecoms, supply chain, lodging, and, yes, even transport tech. FBI analysts tie the shift to Beijing’s Ministry of State Security and the PLA thinking: harass and deter Washington’s coalition, and remind everyone that U.S. support for the Indo-Pacific region comes with real digital costs.

Case in point: over the weekend, Salesforce environments at several U.S. defense contractors and agricultural giants were breached by UNC6040 and UNC6395 groups, both of whom the Bureau says are working in concert with Chinese APTs. Data exfiltration, extortion, and creative use of package delivery metadata for social engineering — File under "Please patch your SaaS and train your staff." The new trick in their toolbox? Weaponizing generative AI, which Anthropic and OpenAI have confirmed is being co-opted to build better phishing tools, write bruteforce code, and automate fake credential generation. With Claude and ChatGPT moonlighting as threat assistants, breaches now scale in hours, not days.

Let’s talk escalation: Emergency calls with the Department of Energy and Homeland Security today focused on HybridPetya ransomware, which is now able to bypass UEFI Secure Boot thanks to a twist on CVE‑2024‑7344. While this specific variant isn’t conclusively Chinese-linked, the timing is too suspicious with other coordinated campaigns. If this malware gets into energy or transport nodes, expect rolling service outages and a fast track for military escalation, as Asia-Pacific cyber skirmishes have already teased.

Defensive measures? CISA’s urging immediate patching of the latest Salesforce and Chrome vulnerabilities, strict network segmentation on legacy manufacturing infrastructure, and "trust but double-verify" on all remote workforce credentialing. Oh, and stop using last year’s passwords, please — the bots know.

So, as some say in Shanghai and now, probably, in Silicon Valley: the digital chessboard just added a few new queens. Thanks for tuning in to Red Alert — subscribe, keep your systems patched, and let’s hack another day. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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