This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.

Ting here, cyber listeners, and let’s jack straight into this week’s Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege—which, if you’ve got alerts set, has been wild since Monday. You want sophisticated? Let’s start with the “Volt Typhoon” crew. According to Mike Burgess, Australia’s top spymaster, and confirmed by U.S. folks over at the NSA, Volt Typhoon didn’t take a Veterans Day holiday. These hackers have been probing deep into American power grids, water management, and even transportation systems, using tactics like living-off-the-land—they stay low, quietly slip in using stolen credentials, and avoid dropping malware payloads that would set off alarms. It’s stealth espionage: reverse engineering trusted software, hiding in plain sight, and exfiltrating data drip by encrypted drip.

How do we know it’s China? Attribution is usually murky, but in this case, technical forensics link command servers to Chinese ISPs, unique code reuse from past operations like the infamous Salt Typhoon breach, and—no kidding—some Mandarin-language error messages in the logs. Plus, the targets fit a pattern: telecommunications, energy, financial data, and AI labs. Add in a dash of Chinese messaging apps showing up in the funnel, and it's a stack of evidence that even the skeptics at CyberScoop can’t shrug off.

Switching gears, on the criminal front, Google just filed a RICO suit against a China-based syndicate called Lighthouse. This group spun up more than a hundred fake websites, blasted “your package is stuck” smishing texts, and harvested credit card data from as many as a million Americans, potentially compromising up to 100 million cards. According to Google’s Halimah DeLaine Prado, Lighthouse didn’t just steal cash: they sold “phishing-as-a-service.” Imagine Uber, but for spam and identity theft. It’s cybercrime at cloud scale.

But wait for the twist: a massive piece of the scam puzzle isn’t even in China—it’s Southeast Asia, especially Myanmar and Cambodia. The U.S. just launched its Scam Center Strike Force: DoJ, FBI, Secret Service, plus Treasury’s OFAC, all teaming up to dismantle transnational scam compounds. These operations—think “pig butchering” romance and investment scams—forced trafficked workers to target Americans over months, draining $10 billion in 2024 alone. U.S. Cyber Director Sean Cairncross says these gangs use crypto for laundering, with providers like Huione offering AI-generated fake IDs, deepfakes, and crypto mixing services.

How about defense? The government forced reporting: 72 hours to disclose incidents, 24 for ransom payments. New NIST rules mean cybersecurity gets locked into every stage of new tech—from smart thermostats to IoT hospital gear. Congress keeps grilling the White House on why some officials downplay these attacks, but everyone agrees: private sector vigilance, zero-trust models, and cross-agency rapid response are working in tandem. Arkose Labs’ Kevin Gosschalk says Google’s lawsuit alone is forcing other syndicates to reconsider their exposure—deterrence by lawsuit is suddenly in play.

Takeaway for the week? Attribution is personal now: Chinese actors aren’t just chasing secrets—they’re after wallets, electricity, and the systems Americans touch every day. Defense is shifting from passive perimeter to “active defense in depth,” and government and industry are learning to share intel before the next zero-day strikes.

Thanks for tuning in to Dragon’s Code! Subscribe for the latest on cyber showdowns, and remember: stay patched, question that “stuck package” text, and watch this space. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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