China's Spare Keys: Why Beijing Just Hid Backdoors in Your Power Grid and Stole Your AI Over the Weekend

About this episode

The episode discusses China's recent cyber activities targeting US infrastructure and AI technology.

This is your Red Alert: China's Daily Cyber Moves podcast. Hey listeners, I’m Ting, and Red Alert is lit today, so let’s jack straight into what China’s been doing on the cyber front against the United States. Over the past few days, threat intel from CrowdStrike’s 2026 Technology Threat Landscape Report and allied feeds has been screaming the same message: Chinese state-linked crews are in full sprint to steal AI tech they can’t build fast enough at home. CrowdStrike flat-out calls it “cyberespionage as industrial policy,” focused on US cloud providers, chip designers in places like California and Texas, and AI startups sitting on frontier models and training pipelines. Here’s the rough timeline from the last 72 hours. Late Sunday night East Coast time, multiple US telecom backbones flagged weird lateral movement coming from compromised edge devices in regional data centers. Those logs match tactics long associated with Volt Typhoon and related China-nexus clusters: living off the land, abusing built‑in Windows tools, and hiding in normal admin traffic. By Monday morning, US energy and water utilities in at least three states saw similar probes against operational tech…

People in this episode

Host: Ting

Topics covered

• cybersecurity
• China
• AI theft
• cyberespionage
• US infrastructure
• threat intelligence

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• China
• AI
• cyberespionage
• CISA
• CrowdStrike
• infrastructure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CrowdStrike, CISA, Volt Typhoon

Places: United States, California, Texas

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