This is your Tech Shield: US vs China Updates podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here, and wow do I have a week's worth of cyber chaos to break down for you. We're talking about the US essentially hitting the defense button while China's been hitting the offense button with steroids, and spoiler alert, it's not going great.

Let's start with the elephant in the room. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA as we call it, has just gotten absolutely gutted. We're talking a one-third cut in staff, which sounds bad until you hear that there's now a 40 percent vacancy rate across key mission areas. That's basically like reducing your security team right when someone's actively trying to rob your house. Chris Krebs, who literally founded CISA during Trump's first term before getting fired for saying the 2020 election wasn't hacked, put it perfectly: the federal cyber posture has been scaled back while adversaries are accelerating with AI. The strategy is unclear, headcount is down, and capacity is gutted.

Now here's where it gets really wild. The Federal Communications Commission just dropped telecommunications security standards that had been put in place after discovering Salt Typhoon, a Chinese government hacking group that went undetected for years while accessing major US phone companies. Roll those back and boom, you're basically reinviting them to the party. Anne Neuberger, who was deputy national security adviser under Biden, warned that China's hacking of multiple telecoms spanning several years without detection highlighted that telecom cybersecurity was inadequate to defend against the threat. The FCC's response? They called the rules unlawful and ineffective. Brilliant timing.

Speaking of Salt Typhoon, we just learned this week that according to former FBI officials like Cynthia Kaiser, virtually every American has been impacted by this campaign. Not targeted, impacted. The hackers had full reign access to telecommunications data for five years, meaning they could listen to your grandmother reminding you to pick up groceries, while simultaneously targeting government officials like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Kamala Harris. Pete Nicoletti, chief information security officer at Check Point, called it unprecedented.

Here's the thing that keeps cybersecurity experts up at night though. Salt Typhoon probably didn't leave. Nicoletti's biggest concern is that they're still embedded in various organizations undetected. They've had five years to establish footholds and exfiltrate data.

Meanwhile, AI is making everything exponentially worse. Generative AI has fueled a 1,265 percent increase in phishing volume and 442 percent surge in voice phishing attacks. Anthropic revealed that Chinese government-backed hackers were using Claude to create autonomous agents running espionage campaigns against tech companies, financial institutions, and government agencies with minimal human oversight.

The real kicker is that leadership positions remain empty. Congress hasn't confirmed new directors for CISA or the National Security Agency. That leaves priorities and strategy in limbo at the exact moment we need clarity most.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this breakdown. Please subscribe for more on how this cybersecurity crisis unfolds. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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