This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast.
Name’s Ting. Let’s jack straight into Dragon’s Code: America Under Cyber Siege.
This week, the Chinese state-aligned crews didn’t go loud, they went deep. At Cyber Week 2025 in Tel Aviv, CISA executive assistant director Nick Anderson told listeners that Chinese operators have already pre-positioned malware across U.S. water utilities, regional power grids, telecom backbones, cloud platforms, and even identity systems, all designed to sit dormant until a Taiwan or South China Sea crisis flips the “go” switch. According to Anderson, this is no longer classic espionage; it’s battlespace prep for instant chaos in daily American life.
Check Point’s new report “Threats to the Homeland: Cyber Operations Targeting US Government and Critical Infrastructure” backs that up, showing that roughly a third of nation‑state incidents hitting U.S. critical infrastructure since 2024 involved energy entities, with Chinese-linked “strategic access actors” burrowing into industrial control systems and SCADA environments. Their tradecraft is textbook China: living off the land, abusing identity, exploiting zero‑days, and riding supply-chain and managed service providers so they can pivot from a single compromised vendor into multiple utilities at once.
On the ground, utilities are discovering suspicious traffic paths flowing through Chinese‑made solar inverters and grid electronics. The Washington Post and The Independent, citing Strider Technologies, recently highlighted that about 85 percent of surveyed U.S. utilities rely on inverters tied to Chinese state-linked firms, and Reuters reporting described “rogue communication devices” in some units that could bypass firewalls and provide remote access into grid segments. One unnamed U.S. official put it bluntly: you don’t have to take down the entire Western Interconnection to panic America; a handful of synchronized blackouts will do.
Attribution is coming from a stack of signals: shared infrastructure and tooling with known Ministry of State Security clusters, overlaps with groups like Salt Typhoon that previously compromised at least nine U.S. telecoms, and telemetry from companies such as Check Point and other major threat intel shops showing the same Chinese nexus infrastructure re-used across energy, transport, and government networks. Beijing, for the record, calls all of this “groundless smears,” but the forensics, as my fellow nerds at CrowdStrike like to say, do not care about press statements.
Defenders aren’t standing still. CISA is pushing infrastructure operators to crank up logging and telemetry across OT and cloud identity, shift to secure‑by‑design architectures, and hunt proactively for China-linked pre‑positioning tools instead of waiting for alarms. Major utilities are segmenting OT from IT, ripping and replacing the riskiest foreign‑made inverters, and pressure is building in Congress for tighter procurement rules and mandatory reporting for critical infrastructure incidents.
The lessons this week? First, China isn’t just stealing data; it’s wiring in options for coercion. Second, identity and supply chain are the new front doors. And third, if you’re running water, power, or telecom in America and you still think you’re “too small to target,” congratulations, you are exactly the quiet little node a strategic access actor wants to own.
I’m Ting, 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.
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