China's Tech Giants on Secret US Blacklist That Vanished Plus AI Deepfakes Fooling Governments

This is your Digital Dragon Watch: Weekly China Cyber Alert podcast. Hey listeners, I'm Ting, and welcome back to Digital Dragon Watch. This week has been absolutely wild in the China cyber space, so let's dive right in. First up, we've got some serious drama unfolding with the US government potentially reversing course on Chinese tech restrictions. The Register broke the story that the Federal Register briefly published an updated list of designated Chinese Military companies, and it included some absolute heavyweights like Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD. But here's where it gets spicy—the list vanished within hours after a government agency requested its withdrawal. Pentagon spokespeople say a revised version is coming soon. Reuters is reporting that the administration might actually lift bans on Chinese telcos operating in the US and could walk away from plans to block TP-Link products. This is a complete 180 from the Trump administration's Clean Network policy that launched in 2020. Experts suspect this move is pure negotiating chess ahead of a planned Trump-Xi meeting. Now, let's talk about actual attacks happening right now. According to Check Point Research's latest threat intelligence bulletin, we're seeing Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation by nation-state actors including Salt Typhoon. BeyondTrust Remote Support has also been hit hard with CVE-2026-1731, a remote code execution flaw affecting thousands of instances. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, ordered federal agencies to patch this within three days as of Friday. The Register reports that around eleven thousand BeyondTrust instances were exposed online, with eighty-five hundred being on-premises deployments. This is particularly concerning because Salt Typhoon previously breached the US Treasury Department two years ago using similar BeyondTrust exploits. Here's something that should keep you up at night: Interpol's cybercrime director Neal Jetton, speaking from their Singapore operations, called the weaponization of AI by cybercriminals the biggest threat he's seeing. Neal emphasized that the sheer volume of attacks is expanding exponentially, and criminals are using sophisticated AI to create deepfake videos of government officials endorsing scam investments. On the defensive side, India just announced strict new rules requiring social media platforms to detect and remove AI-generated intimate content within two hours. Singapore announced a thirty-billion-dollar tech fund for national AI missions. And according to ASPI Strategist, Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made headlines by directly naming China as the threat when discussing Taiwan, which actually boosted her credibility heading into recent elections. The bottom line is we're watching a massive shift in geopolitical positioning around AI and cybersecurity. China's becoming more aggressive, the US is reconsidering restrictions, and allied nations are scrambling to This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.