This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.
Hey listeners, I'm Ting, your go-to gal for all things China cyber chaos and hacking wizardry. Picture this: it's December 2025, and America's digital fortress is under siege from Beijing's slickest operators—welcome to Dragon's Code, where Chinese hackers are scripting the ultimate infrastructure takedown. Over the past week, the spotlight's on a nasty zero-day in Cisco Secure Email Gateway, CVE-2025-20393, a perfect 10 on the CVSS scale from improper input validation. Cisco's Talos team dropped the bomb: a China-nexus APT group, sniffing around since late November, has been planting backdoors and log-wipers on over 100 exposed devices worldwide. Shadowserver Foundation's Peter Kijewski clocked hundreds of vulnerable Cisco customers, mostly in the US, India, and Thailand—targeting email gateways with Spam Quarantine enabled, snagging unauthorized access for data heists and pivots into corporate nets.
These stealthy foxes love supply-chain jabs too—think Chinese-made power gear flagged as a ticking bomb in the US grid, per Rod Trent's Security Check-in. Attackers slip in via unpatched flaws, exfiltrate configs, then lurk for disruption, blending espionage with potential blackouts. Attribution? Cisco Talos pins it on state-backed crews, echoing LongNosedGoblin from ESET Research, who weaponize Windows Group Policy for Southeast Asia and Japan gov hits—malware droppers for long-haul spying. It's not brute force; it's elegant persistence, evading detection with custom tools while DDoS surges hammer grids amid holiday phishing spikes.
US defenses kicked in hard: CISA slapped it on the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list, deadline December 24—patch to 12.4.3-03245 or rebuild infected boxes, Cisco urges. Shadowserver scans, Censys exposes 220 leaky gateways, and firms like Arctic Wolf push FortiGate firewall mitigations against similar auth bypasses. Experts like Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade on Security Conversations warn of merging espionage, crime, and infra sabotage—China's play from their May 2025 National Security White Paper, fusing civil-military tech for self-reliance in AI, quantum, and biotech.
Lessons? Zero-trust your email stack, audit Chinese supply chains—Elon Musk's even chirping about US power lags giving Beijing the AI edge. Proactive scans, public-private teams like the US gov's privatized cyber ops push, and international standard wars are our shields. Stay vigilant, listeners—harden those perimeters or watch the dragon breathe fire.
Thanks for tuning in—subscribe for more cyber spice! This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.
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