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

Today’s episode drops you right into the fire: Dragon’s Code—America Under Cyber Siege. I’m Ting, and unless you’ve been living in an EMP-shielded bunker all week, you know the Chinese threat actors haven’t been napping. If you’re tuning in for cute cat videos, keep scrolling. This is the high-wire act of cyber defense, and you’re looking straight down.

Picture this: It’s Monday, and power flickers in the Pacific Northwest—Portland’s smart grid command goes haywire. Turns out, as Sarah Lane over at CISO Series dug up, this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill ransomware. We’re talking about an advanced persistent threat, likely the "Karma Panda" group, deploying multi-stage exploits against industrial control facility firmware. First stage—weaponized phishing with AI-personalized lures, blending OpenAI clones with Mandarin-language payloads. Second stage—living-off-the-land attacks, using legitimate sysadmin tools, even pivoting via signed Microsoft drivers. What’s devious? No custom malware droppers: everything looked authorized until it didn’t.

While the lights dimmed in Portland, Houston’s water management dashboard went wild. Incident forensics from Mandiant reveal the attackers used deepfake credentials—synthetic identities borrowing real social security numbers to slip through multi-factor like butter on hot bao. Water treatment, SCADA nodes, cloud backups, all touched. As described by Rob Jansen of DNV, this is hybrid warfare: broad net attacks, throwing shade on which system is the real target, keeping defenders stretched and confused.

But how did they know where to poke and prod? The Department of Homeland Security’s Bryan Li, in a rare podcast appearance, shared a nugget: telemetry suggests the attackers leveraged zero-day flaws in legacy VPNs, and—get this—staged command and control relays through compromised city library WiFi systems across three states. That’s right, your overdue ebook may have helped mask one of the most significant espionage campaigns this year.

On attribution: While China’s Foreign Ministry is busy finger-pointing at NSA espionage, US CERT and CrowdStrike both confirm the indicators match previous Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) playbooks. We’re talking Mandarin-language code comments, reuse of older web shell functions, the works. The FBI’s Renee Shapiro told Reuters the operational tempo, and the cryptographic obfuscation, mirror what we saw in last year’s Chengdu telecom hack.

Defensive measures swooped in: Eight regional utilities air-gapped their networks in under three hours—no small feat. Rapid rollout of threat intelligence feeds meant new indicator signatures circulated by noon Tuesday. Microsoft and Splunk distributed patch advisories for VPN appliances before supper Wednesday. But the real star? Humans. US Cyber Command’s “Wolfpack” rapid-response SOC intercepted outbound data streams and shut off exfiltration mid-packet. In Jansen’s words: “AI flagged it, but analysts pounced it.”

Lessons learned? Assume your MFA is being deepfaked. Don’t treat library WiFi like it’s a bowling alley snack bar—monitor everything. Above all, old equipment with “coming soon” firmware upgrades is hacker catnip. Update, authenticate, and never underestimate the creativity of a bored Mandarin-speaking coder with a taste for chaos.

Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe for next week’s play-by-play on Dragon’s Code. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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