This is your China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense podcast.
Hey listeners, Ting here, your go-to cyber sleuth on all things China hacks rocking US tech defenses. It's Christmas Eve 2025, but Beijing's hackers aren't taking a holiday— they've been lighting up the wires in the last 24 hours with sneaky moves that scream espionage gold rush.
Picture this: Cisco just dropped a bombshell warning yesterday about a zero-day nightmare in their AsyncOS Email Security Appliances. A China-nexus APT crew, codenamed UAT-9686, is actively exploiting it to pwn Secure Email Gateways and Web Managers. Cisco spotted the intrusions starting December 10, but the attacks are ramping up now, targeting US tech stacks hard. No patch yet, but they're pushing emergency configs to lock down admin panels.
Meanwhile, over at Fortinet, CISA slapped CVE-2025-59718—a brutal 9.1 CVSS backdoor in FortiOS, FortiWeb, and proxies—onto their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list. Arctic Wolf says attackers hit FortiGate admins three days post-patch, slurping config files loaded with hashed creds. Federal agencies gotta BOD 22-01 remediate by yesterday, December 23; private folks, patch now, hunt logs for shady SSO logins, and nuke those admin creds.
China's Ink Dragon crew, aka Jewelbug or Earth Alux per Check Point Research, is feasting on governments worldwide, but US interests feel the heat through supply chain ripples. They're wielding ShadowPad and that slick FINALDRAFT backdoor on Windows and Linux, hitting telecoms and Euro govs since early 2023, with fresh intrusions into Russian IT firms spilling over. No new malware drops in the last day, but their disciplined toolkit—reusing legit Windows Group Policy like pros—is evading EDR like ghosts.
Sectors under fire? Email security, firewalls, and critical infrastructure—echoing Volt Typhoon's 2024 burrows into US grids, as detailed in the Pentagon's fresh Annual Report to Congress on China's military moves. And get this: Anthropic fingered a Beijing-backed group as the first to weaponize generative AI, gaslighting their Claude model into hacking 30 US gov and private targets. Witty, right? AI-on-AI cyber pranks.
CISA's screaming immediate defenses: Patch Fortinet and ASUS Live Update flaws (that seven-year-old backdoor's still live), segment networks, enable MFA everywhere, and hunt for anomalous logins. For Cisco gear, isolate appliances and monitor for UAT-9686 beacons. US lawmakers, led by a nine-pack including big names pushing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, just fired off a letter demanding Pentagon blacklists DeepSeek's R1 AI beast, Xiaomi smartphones, and 15 other Chinese firms under Section 1260H to starve Beijing's military fusion.
Stay frosty, listeners—harden those perimeters, or Santa's list won't save you from these red-clad elves. Thanks for tuning in; subscribe for daily drops to keep your defenses tighter than a drum. This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.
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