China's Cyber Trojan Horse: Burrowing Deep into US Infrastructure cover art

China's Cyber Trojan Horse: Burrowing Deep into US Infrastructure

China's Cyber Trojan Horse: Burrowing Deep into US Infrastructure

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 This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here, your resident China-and-cyber nerd, and this week’s US‑China CyberPulse is…spicy.

Let’s start with the big alarm bell: according to a recent warning from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, senior official Eric Goldstein and colleagues say Chinese state-backed operators have already burrowed into US water systems, power grids, telecom networks, cloud providers, and even identity systems, using a “pre‑positioning” strategy — planting malware now so it’s ready to fire in a Taiwan or South China Sea crisis. CISA is shifting hard toward hunting that dormant access across operational technology and industrial control systems, and they’re pushing operators to crank up logging and telemetry so those faint Chinese footprints can’t hide in the noise.

On the strategic side, Check Point Software’s latest assessment on US critical infrastructure says the quiet spying era is over; Chinese and other state-aligned groups are treating persistent access as a latent strategic weapon, not just a data vacuum. They’re mixing espionage, disruption, and psychological ops, and leaning on zero‑days, identity abuse, and supply‑chain compromise as standard tradecraft. That’s exactly why US policymakers and think tanks like the Atlantic Council are doubling down on “zero trust” architectures, data resilience, and continuous threat hunting as the new normal.

Policy-wise, Washington is conflicted. CyberNews reports that the Trump administration has been soft-pedaling public retaliation for China-linked “Salt Typhoon” activity, even rolling back some FCC telecom rules inspired by that campaign while prioritizing trade talks with Beijing. At the same time, lawmakers like John Cornyn and Gary Peters are reviving a bill to harden commercial satellite operators, forcing tighter cybersecurity baselines on the space layer that US forces would rely on in any showdown with the People’s Liberation Army.

Meanwhile, the private sector is not waiting around. CrowdStrike just bragged that its Falcon platform hit 100 percent detection and protection in the latest MITRE ATT&CK evaluation, zero false positives, which is basically an arms‑race flex aimed squarely at state-backed crews out of places like Chengdu and Tianjin. And Nvidia, under heavy scrutiny after US criminal cases exposed China‑linked smuggling rings for its AI chips, is rolling out location‑tracking safeguards and GPU telemetry tools so data‑center operators can spot diverted or tampered hardware, closing one more loophole that Chinese buyers have been exploiting.

Internationally, the narrative war is heating up too. At a Beijing press conference, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun flipped the script, calling China “the biggest victim of cyberattacks” and accusing the US National Security Agency of hacking China’s National Time Service Center with help from the UK. That’s Beijing’s way of framing US and UK sanctions and indictments as politicized and hypocritical, even as Western agencies document China’s own pre‑positioning in critical infrastructure.

Technically, the defense trend line is clear: more zero trust, more AI‑driven threat hunting, more secure‑by‑design mandates, and more joint operations between government and big vendors to actually disrupt Chinese infrastructure, not just file angry reports. The open question is whether politics and trade will let those defenses move as fast as the operators in the Ministry of State Security.

That’s your US‑China CyberPulse for the week. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next breach breakdown. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

For more http://www.quietplease.ai


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