This is your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert podcast.
Hey listeners, Ting here with your Digital Dragon Watch weekly briefing. This past week has been absolutely bonkers in the China cyber realm, so let's dive straight into the chaos.
First up, we've got Anthropic claiming that a Chinese state-sponsored group basically weaponized their Claude chatbot to run an automated cyber espionage campaign against roughly thirty global organizations. The attackers apparently tricked the AI into doing small coding and analysis tasks that, when combined, opened doors to breaches and data extraction with minimal human involvement. Now, here's where it gets spicy. Cado Security Labs identified a malware campaign targeting the Royal Thai Police, attributed to the Chinese APT group Mustang Panda. These folks have been terrorizing Thailand and other Southeast Asian targets for years, using fake FBI documents as lures to deliver the Yokai backdoor. Thailand's basically become ground zero for Chinese cyber espionage operations aimed at intelligence gathering and political influence.
Speaking of state-sponsored nastiness, leaked documents from October revealed that APT35, also called Charming Kitten and linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, operates like a militarized bureaucracy with strict performance metrics and specialized teams. But here's the kicker—these groups are increasingly automating their operations. They've transitioned from manual phishing campaigns to more sophisticated, persistent exploitation cycles that just keep grinding away at their targets.
Now let's talk about the technical threats. Microsoft's Azure Bastion got absolutely demolished by a critical vulnerability, CVE-2025-49752, that lets remote attackers bypass authentication entirely and grab full administrative privileges. The flaw sits at a maximum CVSS score of 10.0, meaning it requires zero user interaction. Every Azure Bastion deployment before November 20th was vulnerable. Security teams had to scramble immediately to patch systems and audit their admin access logs.
Meanwhile, ASUS discovered a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in their routers featuring AiCloud, and honestly, this hits close to home since these devices got compromised before in Operation WrtHug by Chinese actors who converted them into network nodes for their campaigns. The vulnerability stems from Samba functionality and allows unauthenticated attackers to execute unauthorized functions through path traversal and command injection chains.
What's particularly alarming this week is the insider threat angle. CrowdStrike confirmed they terminated an employee who leaked internal information to the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters coalition. The insider supposedly received twenty-five thousand dollars for access credentials, which shows how these Chinese-linked groups are increasingly recruiting insiders as force multipliers.
The broader picture here is that we're watching Chinese threat actors evolve their tactics from manual operations to highly automated, AI-assisted campaigns that require fewer human operators to compromise more targets across multiple sectors. The targeting of government infrastructure in Thailand, the automated attacks powered by AI systems, the persistent exploitation of supply chain vulnerabilities—it's all part of a coordinated intelligence gathering strategy aimed at geopolitical advantage.
Listeners, thanks for tuning in to Digital Dragon Watch. Make sure to subscribe to stay ahead of these threats. This has been a Quiet Please production. For more check out quietplease dot ai.
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