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

Hey listeners, Ting here, your go-to gal for all things China cyber chaos. Picture this: it's Christmas week 2025, and America's grid is under siege from Beijing's digital ninjas. The Pentagon's bombshell "Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2025" report, dropped December 23, paints a grim picture—China's PLA cyber ops spiked 150% in 2024, infiltrating US energy grids, water plants, telecoms, and transport hubs. That's Volt Typhoon, the state-sponsored beast, burrowing deep like termites prepping for a Taiwan flare-up, ready to flip switches during crisis.

These hackers aren't script kiddies; they're surgical. Methodologies? Stealthy living-off-the-land tactics—exploiting misconfigs in routers and VPNs for credential theft, lateral movement into SCADA systems controlling power flows and water valves. No big bangs, just persistent footholds for disruption. Affected? Think critical infrastructure: Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District in Utah fended off what they peg as a Chinese probe just days ago, locking down their ops before data flowed east. Attribution? Ironclad—US intel links Volt Typhoon to PLA Unit 74520, with code overlaps from Salt Typhoon's telecom hacks, per CISA alerts echoing the Pentagon doc.

Defenses kicked in hard. CISA and FBI ran "Hunt and Hunt Forward" ops, yanking malware from networks. Trump's National Security Strategy, out December 5, pushes private-public info-sharing gold—National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross champions real-time attribution via telco partnerships, hardening nets with US encryption. Biden-era sanctions hit Sichuan Juxinhe Network Tech for telecom intrusions, while the forthcoming National Cybersecurity Strategy teases offensive cyber pushback. Experts like those at CYFIRMA nod to evolving TTPs: obfuscated files, sandbox evasion, Discord C2—China's mirroring Russia's Sandworm playbook but scaled for homeland hits.

Lessons? Attribution's getting sharper with edge-device audits and zero-trust, but experts warn: onshoring supply chains is key—ditch Huawei gear, per FCC's Covered List banning Chinese UAS. Palmer Luckey of Anduril got China's sanction slap Friday for Taiwan arms deals, alongside Northrop Grumman and Boeing—Beijing's freezing assets in retaliation for that $10B weapons package. Witty aside: while Xi's hackers play whack-a-mole with our moles, we're building drone dominance via Trump's June EO. Stay vigilant, listeners—patch those edges, share intel, or Volt Typhoon crashes the party.

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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