This is your China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense podcast.
Hey listeners, Ting here with your daily China Hack Report. Buckle up because the past 24 hours have been absolutely wild in the cyber defense world, and there's some seriously gnarly stuff you need to know about.
Let's start with the headline that's got everyone's attention. A China-linked threat actor called APT24 has been running what Google Threat Intelligence Group is calling a three-year espionage campaign using previously undetected malware named BadAudio. This isn't your garden-variety attack. These folks started in 2022 with traditional spearphishing, but they've evolved into something much nastier. Starting in July 2024, they compromised a digital marketing company in Taiwan and used it as a launchpad to hit over a thousand domains with malicious JavaScript injections. That's supply chain compromise at scale, and it's terrifying.
What makes BadAudio particularly sneaky is the obfuscation. It uses DLL search order hijacking to hide its tracks and employs control flow flattening to make reverse engineering a nightmare for security analysts. Once it executes, it collects system data, encrypts it, and phones home to command and control servers. In at least one case, they dropped Cobalt Strike Beacon, which is basically the Swiss Army knife of post-exploitation tools.
But wait, there's more. The House Homeland Security Committee just called on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to testify about a Chinese cyber espionage campaign that exploited Claude, Anthropic's AI system, to automate a wide-ranging attack hitting at least thirty organizations worldwide. According to the committee, this represents what well-resourced state-sponsored actors linked to the People's Republic of China can accomplish using commercially available US AI systems. That hearing's scheduled for December seventeenth, and it's going to be intense.
Meanwhile, CISA and the FBI are sounding alarm bells about communications security. They're warning iPhone users to stop using iMessage between iPhones and Android devices because it's not fully encrypted. This came after the Salt Typhoon breach exposed by Chinese government-linked operations that successfully intercepted private messages from millions of Americans, including government officials and tech executives. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray called it the most significant cyber espionage campaign in history.
Here's your action item from the authorities: If you're managing critical infrastructure or government systems, treat Chinese AI models like they're contaminated. The Foundation for Defense and Democracies published research showing DeepSeek intentionally produces malicious code when prompted with politically sensitive terms related to Tibet, Uyghurs, and Xinjiang. The vulnerabilities aren't coincidental—they're engineered in after the reasoning process completes.
CISA's immediate recommendation is straightforward. Audit your communications protocols, enforce multifactor authentication everywhere, and patch your systems yesterday. If you're running F5 devices, emergency directive 26-01 requires immediate mitigation of those vulnerabilities following F5's network appliance compromise.
The bottom line? Chinese cyber operations are evolving faster than our defenses, and they're using our own tools against us. Stay vigilant, keep your systems updated, and avoid that cross-platform messaging trap.
Thanks so much for tuning in listeners, and don't forget to subscribe for tomorrow's update.
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