This is your Digital Frontline: Daily China Cyber Intel podcast.

This is Ting, coming at you straight from the digital foxhole, where every byte matters and paranoia is just good sense. The past 24 hours in China cyber intel? Buckle up—it’s been a wild ride, and I’ve got the lowdown on what’s buzzing across the Great Firewall and into the cloud.

First up, the Ministry of State Security over in Beijing—let’s call them the MSS, because even spies appreciate a good acronym—dropped a bombshell on their WeChat channel. According to their latest post, they’re waving the ‘irrefutable evidence’ flag, claiming the U.S. National Security Agency, the NSA, has been running a multi-year hacking campaign against China’s National Time Service Center. Now, before your eyes glaze over at “time service,” think again. Disrupt Beijing Time, and you’re talking communications, finance, power grids, transport, and defense systems all wobbling like a Jenga tower—because everything in the modern world syncs to a clock, often China’s own. The MSS says the NSA started this digital dance back in March 2022, exploiting flaws in the SMS service of some unnamed foreign smartphone brand, and, impressively, managed to swipe sensitive data from staff devices. By late 2023, they claim the NSA escalated with a buffet of 42 specialized cyber weapons, even going after the high-precision ground-based timing systems. MSS says they intercepted the operation, but let’s be real—when two global superpowers start throwing hacking allegations in public, everyone’s cyber defenses get a nasty case of heartburn.

Now, let’s shift focus from Beijing to the world’s AWS-powered nervous system. Earlier today, according to The Guardian and The Verge, a massive Amazon Web Services outage temporarily took down Snapchat, Robinhood, Fortnite, and a who’s who of the internet’s A-list. Social media lit up with speculation that China had taken a baseball bat to the cloud, but Amazon’s own engineers and cyber analysts like Kevin Mitnick Jr. at CloudSec Research say it was a classic case of AWS infrastructure tripping over its own shoelaces, not a Chinese cyber op. Still, the timing couldn’t be worse—U.S. intelligence has been warning for months about upticks in Chinese reconnaissance ops targeting Western tech and financial systems, so even a routine cloud hiccup gets the rumor mill spinning at warp speed. Takeaway? The world’s over-reliance on AWS is now a global single point of failure—one misconfiguration in Virginia, and suddenly Tokyo, Berlin, and Lagos are all checking their routers.

So, what’s hot on the threat horizon? While the AWS outage wasn’t a Chinese hit, don’t get too comfy. Expert chatter at Cyberscoop and Security Affairs points to continued Chinese APT activity in the U.S. and allied networks, with groups like Volt Typhoon and HAFNIUM still on the prowl, probing for weak links in telecoms, defense, and finance. Earlier this year, U.S. cyber officials flagged a surge in Chinese reconnaissance against American cloud infra—so the targeting may not be new, but the intensity and ambition are dialed up. For businesses, this means every unpatched server, every reused credential, every third-party vendor with lax security is now a potential front door for APT groups with a taste for persistence and patience.

Defensive playbook? Assume you’re already compromised and act accordingly. Multi-factor auth everywhere, patch like your business depends on it (because it does), segment your networks, and keep an eye on your supply chain—because if your coffee machine vendor gets popped, you could be next. For larger orgs, consider tabletop exercises with your CISO and legal teams, because when the MSS and NSA are lobbing allegations, the next move could be sanctions, indictments, or worse—a real-world outage. Oh, and if you’re running AWS? Maybe spread the love across regions and providers. Putting all your cloud eggs in one...