China's Ghost-tapping Spree: Is Your Bank Card Beijing's Latest Loot?

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

Listeners, Ting here, tuning you in to the daily rhythm of Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves. Let’s jolt into the action—the digital chessboard is lit up, and the pieces, my friends, are moving fast.

Just this weekend, Cisco Talos attributed an ongoing attack on Taiwan’s web infrastructure to a group they track as UAT-7237. These are Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat actors who rolled out customized open-source tools, but the kicker is that their real focus isn’t just Taiwan. This same toolkit is cropping up in backdoors and lateral movements across US-linked cloud hosting providers. If you’re running anything on N-able N-central, here’s your official facepalm: CISA and FBI rang in today with dual emergency alerts about new vulnerabilities. CVE-2025-8875 and CVE-2025-8876 now live in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog—over 800 servers still guzzling risk because patching is, apparently, wishful thinking. These flaws enable command execution and insecure deserialization, which basically means attackers have the equivalent of your IT department’s master keys.

Meanwhile, the US CERT is raising its blood pressure over rising credential leaks. Recent weeks saw Chinese operatives boost their game with AI-enhanced phishing—think smart vishing calls that mimic your boss’s voice, and spear-phishing with super-personalized payloads. The result: scores of credentials harvested from executives, some used to pivot into more lucrative enterprise targets. Black Arrow Cyber reports that data breaches are spiking—Salesforce and Allianz Life both tanked under sophisticated data exfiltration campaigns, though ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider are suspected collaborators, possibly passing loot to state actors in Beijing for a fat fee.

Today’s critical escalation? Chinese-speaking groups exploiting “Ghost-tapping.” That’s NFC relay fraud, where burner Androids preloaded with stolen US card data sweep retail and banking systems. Reports are streaming in from the Federal Reserve and unnamed Fortune 50 banks—almost 115 million cards at risk just this month, and the FBI is scrambling financial ISACs to coordinate a defense.

And let’s not sleep on the strategic implications. Anne Neuberger just warned in Foreign Affairs that U.S. digital defenses across critical sectors—hospitals, utilities, the power grid—are nowhere near a cyber wartime footing. The implication? If China moves on Taiwan or escalates regional ambitions, the game board goes dead; the command-and-control centers we count on could go black. So, cue up the defensive playbook: patch known flaws—especially in N-central and Microsoft SharePoint—lock down supply chains, start rehearsing response plans, and enforce zero trust wherever you can. Oh, and if you think MFA is your magic shield, better layer up—AI is already learning how to punch through those codes.

Potential for escalation? Very real. If we see even a whiff of offensive US cyber return-fire—targeting, say, energy grids in Jiangsu or military C3 networks in Guangzhou—expect tit-for-tat and possible spill-over to civilian tech and trade.

Thanks for tuning in to Red Alert: China’s Daily Cyber Moves—don’t forget to subscribe, stay patched, and trust no one—even if it sounds just like your boss. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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