Dragon's Code: China's Hackers Hit America's Power Grid While We Were All Sleeping

About this episode

The episode discusses recent sophisticated Chinese cyber attacks on U.S. power grids and infrastructure.

This is your Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege podcast. Hey listeners, I'm Alexandra Reeves, and welcome to Dragon's Code: America Under Cyber Siege. Over the past week, as of this early morning on April 29, 2026, we've seen some of the slickest Chinese cyber ops hammering U.S. infrastructure like never before—think precision strikes from state-sponsored groups like Volt Typhoon, lurking in networks for months. It kicked off Monday with reports from the OT-ISAC energy sector threat advisory, flagging destructive wipers hitting distributed assets beyond control rooms. Attackers exploited internet-facing PLCs—programmable logic controllers—in power grids from California to Texas, using zero-day vulnerabilities in Siemens and Rockwell Automation systems. Methodologies? Living-off-the-land techniques: no malware drop, just native tools like PowerShell and Cobalt Strike beacons for lateral movement, exfiltrating SCADA configs before planting logic bombs. By Tuesday, CISA and FBI dropped attribution bombshells—IP trails, command-and-control servers in Shenzhen, China, and code signatures matching PLA Unit 61398 ops. Affected systems included East Coast substations and water…

People in this episode

Host: Alexandra Reeves

Topics covered

• cybersecurity
• Chinese cyber operations
• U.S. infrastructure attacks
• power grid vulnerabilities
• state-sponsored hacking
• cyber threat analysis

Keywords

• cyber attacks
• power grid
• Chinese hackers
• infrastructure security
• zero-day vulnerabilities
• CISA
• FBI
• Volt Typhoon
• SCADA
• logic bombs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CISA, FBI, Volt Typhoon, Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Huawei

Places: California, Texas, Florida, East Coast

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• Spicy VPNs and Power Grid Whispers: China's Slowest Heist Gets Messy · June 7, 2026 · 4 min
• China's AI Hackers Are Speed-Running America's Power Grid and Nobody's Ready · June 5, 2026 · 4 min
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