Chinese Hackers Infiltrate US through Euro Backdoors: CISA Raises Alarm, Congress Grills Big Tech

This is your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert podcast.Hey listeners, Ting here with your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert. Buckle up, we’re diving straight into the wires.Over the past week, the headline act is a joint advisory from CISA, NSA, and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security warning about a Chinese state‑sponsored campaign using a backdoor dubbed BRICKSTORM. According to that advisory, BRICKSTORM is built to live quietly inside VMware vSphere and Windows environments, giving persistent access to government networks, IT service providers, and critical infrastructure operators across North America. The new attack vector twist: deep abuse of virtualized data centers, lateral movement through management consoles, and living off the land so logs look boring while the exfiltration is anything but.At the same time, Check Point and GovInfoSecurity report that the China‑linked group Ink Dragon, also known as Jewelbug, has been burrowing into European government networks and then repurposing those misconfigured servers as relay nodes. Instead of hitting US systems directly, they bounce command‑and‑control through European ministries, obscuring attribution while running ShadowPad and updated FINALDRAFT backdoors. That relay‑node tradecraft is the real innovation here: your ally’s government server might now be the launchpad into your own network.On the vulnerability front, Google’s security team reports at least five China‑nexus groups exploiting the React2Shell flaw, a high‑impact vulnerability in popular web stacks. Targets include telecom, cloud service providers, and financial platforms, with a blend of espionage and financially motivated data theft. Think web app RCE chained with credential harvesting, then cloud console takeover.In Washington, the US government isn’t exactly quiet. The new BRICKSTORM advisory from CISA and NSA comes with hardening guidance for VMware and Windows: enforce secure configuration baselines, isolate management networks, enable strong logging, and hunt for anomalous authentication to hypervisors and domain controllers. On Capitol Hill, recent testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee by Royal Hansen highlights a disrupted CCP‑backed AI‑orchestrated espionage campaign, and warns that advanced AI models could supercharge future Chinese offensive cyber ops if chip export controls are loosened.Meanwhile, over on the foreign‑policy side, Craig Singleton’s testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee frames all this as part of China’s hybrid warfare: penetrate networks, pre‑position in critical infrastructure and political systems, then apply pressure later. Europe’s ministries, ports, telecoms, and green‑energy grids are explicitly called out as leverage points.So what should you do, beyond panic‑patching? Experts across CISA, Google, and independent researchers converge on a playbook. First, lock down virtualization: separate admin planes, use hardware tokens or phishing‑resistant MFA for vSphere and cloud consoles, and strip internet exposure from management interfaces. Second, get serious about attack surface management: scan for misconfigurations before Ink Dragon finds them, and monitor for your own assets being abused as relays. Third, treat web stacks like React2Shell as critical infrastructure: rapid patching, web application firewalls with virtual patching, and strict least‑privilege for service accounts. Finally, invest in behavioral detection and threat hunting tuned to Chinese tradecraft: long‑dwell C2, scheduled task persistence, DLL side‑loading, and slow, encrypted data exfil.I’m Ting, your friendly neighborhood China‑cyber nerd. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next Dragon Watch. 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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