This is your China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here with your daily US Tech Defense on China-linked cyber chaos—straight from the trenches, no fluff. Over the last 24 hours, as of December 17, 2025, the heat's on with Chinese hackers dropping bombshells that could wreck US interests. Let's dive in.

First up, Cisco Talos just blew the lid off a zero-day nightmare in Cisco AsyncOS software—think Secure Email Gateway and Web Manager appliances with Spam Quarantine enabled and internet-facing. Chinese state-sponsored crews, active since late November, are exploiting this for full device takeover and persistent backdoors. No patch yet, folks; Cisco's advisory screams wipe and rebuild your appliances if compromised. Kevin Beaumont from the security world warns big orgs are in the crosshairs, and it's unclear how long these backdoors lurked.

Hot on that, Ink Dragon—aka Jewelbug or CL-STA-0049—ramps up hits on US-adjacent government and telecom nets using ShadowPad and a slick new FINALDRAFT variant. Check Point Research reports this China-aligned beast abuses Outlook and Microsoft Graph API for stealthy C2, pushing encoded commands via victim mailboxes. They've pivoted hard to European govs since July, but Asia, Africa, and now echoes in North America mean US partners are relay nodes for espionage. Elastic Security and Palo Alto Unit 42 flagged FINALDRAFT's Windows-Linux cross-play earlier this year.

Don't sleep on BRICKSTORM, the multi-year backdoor CISA, NSA, and Canada's Cyber Centre joint advisory exposed yesterday. Chinese ops target VMware vSphere and Windows in US government, IT providers, and critical infra—North America prime time. Smarter MSP details eight samples with DNS-over-HTTPS stealth, multi-layer encryption, and self-reinstall tricks; one victim endured 17 months undetected from April 2024 to September 2025.

Sectors hammered? Critical infrastructure, email gateways, routers, and cloud like AWS via stolen IAM creds for crypto mining—Amazon GuardDuty spotted that November 2 persistence play. CISA's KEV catalog swelled with D-Link CVE-2022-37055 buffer overflows, Array Networks CVE-2025-66644 command injection, and Fortinet's CVE-2025-59718/59719 auth bypasses in FortiOS and FortiWeb. Australia's ACSC and Canada's Centre echoed urgent patches alongside Microsoft's December bundle fixing exploited CVE-2025-62221.

Defensive moves? CISA mandates federal patches by now—React2Shell CVE-2025-55182 deserialization hit 30+ orgs and 77k servers, but China nexus groups eye it too per Cybersecurity Dive. Huntress flags Gladinet hard-coded keys for RCE. My recs: Audit Cisco gear, patch Fortinet/Microsoft/D-Link ASAP, segment VMware, enable GuardDuty, hunt BRICKSTORM/ShadowPad IOCs via CISA alerts, and rebuild compromised boxes. Rotate IAM creds, ditch internet-facing Spam Quarantine.

Stay frosty, listeners—this AI-boosted espionage from Anthropic's Claude abuse shows they're automating faster. Thanks for tuning in—subscribe for the edge! This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.

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