This is your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert podcast. Hey listeners, Ting here with your Digital Dragon Watch, and the last week has been spicy in China cyber land, so let’s jack in. Let’s start with the fresh joint advisory from the FBI, MI5, and the governments of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as reported by TechCrunch. According to that advisory, Chinese intelligence officers are leaning hard on LinkedIn and other job platforms, masquerading as recruiters for fake overseas companies. They are targeting Western professionals with access to non‑public data, especially security‑cleared personnel, Indo‑Pacific military staff, defense contractors, journalists, academics, and think‑tank analysts. The vector isn’t malware; it’s psychology. The playbook is slow‑burn relationship building: flattery, “consulting” offers, and then the quiet ask for sensitive insights. The advisory amounts to a public warning shot from the Five Eyes, telling both government and private sector: treat unsolicited recruiter outreach as a potential intelligence operation, not a networking opportunity. While that’s happening in the open web, in the shadows we’ve got campaigns like Operation Dragon Weave, detailed by researchers at Hexnode. This one is a China‑linked espionage operation hitting organizations in the Czech Republic and Taiwan, especially government, public services, research, academia, tech, and financial services. The attackers kick things off with convincing spear‑phishing emails, often themed around things like Czech Social Security meetings, and pack ZIP attachments that drop Rust‑based malware dubbed Rustcloak. For command‑and‑control, they use an agent called Azureveil that hides traffic in Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, blending in with normal cloud noise. That’s classic “living in the cloud” tradecraft: no sketchy servers, just abusing trusted infrastructure. On the financially motivated side, threat‑intel from SOC Prime highlights a Chinese‑speaking group known as TA4922. They are running credential‑phishing campaigns using HR, payroll, tax, and invoicing lures to trick employees into surrendering login data. Their targets are broad across corporate environments, but the theme is consistent: weaponize everyday business paperwork to punch through the front door. So how are defenders responding? U.S. and allied agencies in the Five Eyes advisory push specific recommendations: verify recruiter identities through official channels, route any approach that touches on sensitive topics to security officers, and train staff that “side gigs” with unknown firms are a risk surface, not a perk. Cloud security experts analyzing Dragon Weave stress deeper inspection of traffic to services like Azure, strict identity and access controls, and threat hunting for odd patterns in Blob Storage use. Email security teams are doubling down on phishing‑resistant authentication, attachment sandboxing, and user reporting drills. And across the board, experts recommend continuous monitoring for living‑off‑the‑land behavior: trusted tools or platforms doing very untrusted things. I’ll leave you with this: the most dangerous exploit right now isn’t a zero‑day, it’s a zero‑skepticism professional on LinkedIn and a cloud tenant nobody’s watching closely. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai. For more http://www.quietplease.ai Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta