China's Cyber Shenanigans: WSUS Woes, Salt Typhoon Strikes, and Qilin's Rampage!

This is your China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense podcast.This is Ting, coming at you with another China Hack Report: Daily US Tech Defense, and tonight’s theme is breakneck escalation. Let’s skip the appetizer and carve right into what mattered most for US cyber defense and why nobody in SecOps got much sleep last night.First up, if you have anything running Microsoft WSUS, pay attention. Researchers at Gurucul and HackerNews confirmed that CVE-2025-59287—yeah, that’s a 9.8 on the “scream and unplug it” scale—continues to get hammered. Even after getting its so-called Patch Tuesday bandaid, attackers linked with China and Eastern Europe have been exploiting exposed servers with remote code execution, escalating privileges, and in some cases, taking over entire update infrastructures. CISA pushed this flaw straight to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, telling everyone with legacy WSUS deployments or lazy patch habits to update, now, or suffer the déjà vu of standing up a new network from scratch.But WSUS isn’t the only thing in hot water. Salt Typhoon—a group with ties to China, also known as Earth Estries—was spotted by Darktrace hitting a European telecom using an old Citrix NetScaler exploit, the same one published over the summer. Why should you care, listeners? Because their post-exploitation hooks showed up in an American university’s logs yesterday, seriously suggesting reconnaissance or even lateral movement on US soil. The playbook is classic: find one weak link, pivot, harvest credentials, and exfiltrate. Salt Typhoon isn’t just targeting Europe anymore—the scope is clearly global, and US research or telecom orgs should consider themselves on high alert.On the supply chain front, the Qilin ransomware crew, while not strictly Beijing-backed, remains a global headache and their toolsets overlap with “Premier Pass-as-a-Service” operations. Gurucul reports that Qilin keeps up its pace at over 40 breaches a month, with CISA warning manufacturers and scientific facilities to review segmentation, offline backups, and to track anything using Cyberduck or lateral spreading via PsExec.What about policy? China’s Cyberspace Administration is prepping some of the world’s stiffest incident reporting mandates for its own operators and infrastructure, but here’s the kicker—US lawmakers and the FCC responded by tightening bans and scrutiny on nine Chinese telecom entities this week, which, as reported by Security Boulevard, means any device even whispering “manufactured in Beijing” is now on the blacklist.Yesterday saw Cobalt Strike beacons lit up from a mainland China IP, targeting port 8888, a classic precursor to wider command-and-control operations. Meanwhile, Delmia Apriso, key in manufacturing ops, made CISA’s alert list after reports of exploitation targeting its platform—if you’re tracking critical infrastructure, watch those dashboards.Immediate action check: patch WSUS again, validate Citrix and SharePoint hardening, and hunt for suspicious Cyberduck activity or Cobalt Strike signatures. CISA’s bulletins for late October urge layered defense, rapid vulnerability scanning, and all-hands phishing simulation.That’s it for today’s China Hack Report. Thanks for tuning in, catch me tomorrow, and don’t forget to subscribe! This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.For more http://www.quietplease.aiGet the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOtaThis content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI

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