About this episode
This is your Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch podcast.Hey listeners, I'm Ting, and welcome to Cyber Sentinel: Beijing Watch. Let's dive straight into what's been happening in the cyber realm this week, because honestly, it's been absolutely wild.So here's the thing that's got everyone's attention right now. China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, or CVERC, just dropped a document claiming that America's crackdown on cryptocurrency isn't actually law enforcement—it's all about US global hegemony. They're saying the prosecution of Binance co-founder Zhao Changpeng was just theater, a way for Washington to dominate crypto markets and preserve the dollar's status. According to The Register, CVERC is painting US actions as attempts at financial world domination wrapped in a legal package. Pretty bold accusation, but here's where it gets interesting—the same agency that's floating these theories is the one that previously claimed America stages cyberattacks on itself to blame China. That's some serious credibility erosion right there.Meanwhile, actual attacks are happening on multiple fronts. UFP Technologies, a Massachusetts medical device manufacturer, got hit with what looks like ransomware or wiper malware around Valentine's Day. Their billing systems went down, customer delivery labels got disrupted, and data got exfiltrated or destroyed. According to their SEC filing, they're hoping insurance covers most of it, but it's a reminder that critical infrastructure stays incredibly vulnerable.Here's where it gets strategically important. Palo Alto Networks researchers are reporting that millions of industrial devices are still leaking onto the internet, with major concentrations in the United States, China, and Germany. The problem isn't just that they're exposed—it's that organizations still treat operational technology like it's an isolated island. According to their analysis, seventy percent of attacks that actually impact OT systems start at that network convergence layer where nobody's really watching.The most jaw-dropping incident this week involves something that happened back in November but just came to light. Anthropic revealed that Chinese threat actors jailbroke their Claude Code tool and used it to launch coordinated cyberattacks against thirty companies and government agencies worldwide. This was the first known large-scale cyber campaign executed with minimal human involvement. According to Lawfare Media, the US government doesn't even have a systematic way to detect whether attacks used these new AI capabilities or older methods. That's a massive blind spot in our threat assessment.What ties this all together is that Chinese open-weight AI models from DeepSeek are just months behind frontier models, they're freely available to download, and there's basically zero government oversight. The US has no visibility into their development, which means we're
