Speaker 1: Welcome back everybody. Today, we're going to be looking at
Speaker 1: inside China's cyber war and US defense research. If you've
Speaker 1: been watching the world lately, you know the nature of
Speaker 1: warfare has completely shifted. It's not just about boots on
Speaker 1: the ground. It's not just about who has the biggest
Speaker 1: carrier strikes or the quiet submarines. The most dangerous battles
Speaker 1: being fought right now are helping are happening in silence.
Speaker 1: They're happening on servers, data centers, and the networks of
Speaker 1: our most sensitive institutions. And most Americans have absolutely no
Speaker 1: idea we are actively losing a digital war. But Google's
Speaker 1: Threat intelligence group dropped the bombshell report. They're exposed a massive,
Speaker 1: multi year cyber espionage campaign orchestrated by a highly sophisticated
Speaker 1: threat actor known as UNC sixty five oh eight, a
Speaker 1: China and Nexus state sponsored hacker group, China cyber soldiers
Speaker 1: working directly for the People's Republic of China, and what
Speaker 1: they pulled off should scare the heck out of every
Speaker 1: single one of us. These folks didn't target random infrastructure.
Speaker 1: They went off, They went after the crown jewels. They
Speaker 1: targeted North American medical, academic and military research institutions. The
Speaker 1: place is developing the next gen of American tech medical
Speaker 1: breakthroughs in US defense. I know you're asking, how did
Speaker 1: they get in? They found a weak point in an
Speaker 1: externally facing platform called REDCAP. For those who don't know,
Speaker 1: REDCAP stands for Research Electronic Data Capture. It's a secure
Speaker 1: web application used by scientists, military researchers, and doctors to
Speaker 1: build and manage online databases. It's exactly where you store
Speaker 1: highly classified, highly sensitive data when you're running advanced trials
Speaker 1: UNC sixty five. OHA found a way to crack those
Speaker 1: servers open, and once they got inside, they didn't just
Speaker 1: smash and grab. That's not how these elite state actors operate.
Speaker 1: They play the long game. They deployed a highly customized
Speaker 1: piece of malware called infinitord. Think of infiniture as a
Speaker 1: digital ghost. It's a customer built, custom built tool designed
Speaker 1: for one specific purpose to sit quietly in the show
Speaker 1: shadows of a network, harvest credentials, steal user names and
Speaker 1: passwords passwords, and maintain what the tech world calls persistence.
Speaker 1: They stayed hidden inside some of these environments for over
Speaker 1: a year. Think about that for a second. For twelve
Speaker 1: plus months, Chinese intelligence operators had a backdoor key to
Speaker 1: American military and medical research networks. They were sitting in
Speaker 1: the room virtually reading over the shoulders of our top
Speaker 1: scientists and defense strategists. So what are they looking for?
Speaker 1: Everything that matters for the next fifty years of global dominance.
Speaker 1: They exfiltrated massive trops of data on advanced medical research.
Speaker 1: They stole US defense strategy documents. They targeted advanced technology,
Speaker 1: cutting edge artificial intelligence, and this is the part that
Speaker 1: really hits home. Autonomous and uncrude systems, drone technology, robotic warfare,
Speaker 1: the exact tech that our guys are going to rely
Speaker 1: on in the field to stay alive. If you want
Speaker 1: to defeat America in a conflict ten years from now,
Speaker 1: you don't want to wait for the war to start.
Speaker 1: You steal the bootprints where they're still being written. If
Speaker 1: you want to defeat the soccer team in the World
Speaker 1: Cup before, you don't want to wait for them to
Speaker 1: start implementing their strategy. You want to know what it
Speaker 1: is beforehand if you can. But the technical but the
Speaker 1: technical sophistication didn't stop at the malware. The Google thread
Speaker 1: hunters discovered that these guys were using incredibly novel techniques
Speaker 1: to get the data out of our house and into theirs.
Speaker 1: They actually manipulated Google workspace compliance rules. Think about how
Speaker 1: brilliant this is. They didn't use some loud, aggressive file
Speaker 1: transfer protocol that were triggered alarm. They quietly altered the
Speaker 1: internal administrative rules of the victim organization's own Google system.
Speaker 1: They made the system itself bypass its own security checks,
Speaker 1: treating the data theft like a routine, compliant, autumn heated task.
Speaker 1: By the time security teams realized what was happening, that
Speaker 1: data was already gone. Fortunately, Google's Threat Intelligence group caught
Speaker 1: onto this. They acted. They disrupted the infrastructure of the
Speaker 1: UNC six y five oh eight was running, was using
Speaker 1: to run these operations, and that've been burning the men
Speaker 1: out OZO notifying the effected organizations to help them patch
Speaker 1: the holes and kick these ghosts out. But who is this?
Speaker 1: But who else is there? Who else is in there
Speaker 1: right now that we haven't caught, That's the real question.
Speaker 1: This is not an isolated incident. This is a highly coordinated,
Speaker 1: incredibly well funded, asymmetrical war being waged against the US.
Speaker 1: When we're distracted by the news, nonsense, and the politics.
Speaker 1: Our adversaries are systematically draining our intellectual property and dismantling
Speaker 1: our tech edge. If we don't start taking cybersecurity as
Speaker 1: seriously as we take kinetic warfare, we're gonna wake up
Speaker 1: one day and realize we lost the war before a
Speaker 1: shot wasn't ever fired. Stay safe out there, everyone, and
Speaker 1: stay vigilant.