Volt Typhoon Moles, DeepSeek Flexes, and Why Your Router Might Be a Chinese Bot Farm cover art

Volt Typhoon Moles, DeepSeek Flexes, and Why Your Router Might Be a Chinese Bot Farm

Volt Typhoon Moles, DeepSeek Flexes, and Why Your Router Might Be a Chinese Bot Farm

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 This is your US-China CyberPulse: Defense Updates podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here, your go-to cyber sleuth on all things China hacks and digital showdowns. Picture this: it's early February 2026, and the US-China CyberPulse is throbbing like a server farm on overdrive. China's Volt Typhoon crew has been burrowing into our critical infrastructure like digital moles, prepositioning malware for the big one, as FDD analysts warned just days ago. But America's not sleeping—DHS is scrambling to revive public-private info-sharing after dismantling the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council last year. They're pushing ANCHOR as the new hotness, a forum for oil and gas bigwigs and feds to swap threat intel without FOIA nightmares or antitrust jitters. House Energy and Commerce Committee witnesses begged for it at their January hearing, and now it's on Secretary Kristi Noem's desk. Meanwhile, Congress patched the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 through September, but experts say without permanent liability shields, private sector players like those in energy won't pass the cyber ball—adversaries win.

Flip to new defensive strategies: the Trump admin renominated Sean Plankey to helm CISA, beefing up an agency gutted by shortages. The National Defense Strategy dropped without naming China's cyber menace outright—ouch, a blind spot amid Beijing's probes. On the policy front, the Science Committee marked up tech competition bills February 4th, tackling quantum threats to encryption and post-quantum standards from CISA to shield infrastructure. FCC just urged telecoms to armor up against ransomware, fresh off Salt Typhoon's hack of US networks—those Chinese state hackers hit small carriers hard, per today's Cybersecurity Dive report.

Private sector's innovating wild: Forescout's 2025 Threat Roundup flags China-linked ops targeting medical systems and SOHO routers for botnets. States are under siege too—China, Russia, North Korea pounding away, with AI supercharging phishing, as state CIOs griped in StateTech Magazine. Tech-wise, semiconductor sanctions backfired hilariously; BIS's 2022 export bans on NVIDIA H100s and tools from Applied Materials spurred China's $47.5 billion fund in 2024, birthing DeepSeek's GPU-light AI models. Now they're closing the chip gap, fueling self-reliant cyber weapons.

Internationally? ZHAO Hai from CASS called at Davos January 22 for rebooting US-China Track-1 AI talks—covering regulation, misuse like automated attacks, and human control. Xi echoed AI cooperation prospects last fall. Japan and Britain inked cyber pacts against China's regional flex, while CCID's January 14 report prioritizes misuse prevention, data protection, and agile governance, including a full AI law.

Folks, it's a cat-and-mouse hack-a-thon—US tightening ANCHOR and quantum crypto, China doubling down on BeiDou sats for intel dominance and cybercrime bans with exit penalties. Stay vigilant; these pulses could spike any second.

Thanks for tuning in, listeners—subscribe for more CyberPulse drops! This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease.ai.

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