He wasn’t phishing accounts or exfiltrating files — he was using face-to-face social engineering and CCP-monitored communication apps to build trust, extract narratives, and gather intelligence.
Link: https://stanfordreview.org/investigation-uncovering-chinese-...
It’s not strictly “cyber,” but it’s a perfect illustration of the same asymmetry: authoritarian states exploiting the West’s openness — not just digitally, but culturally and institutionally.
What’s striking is how little the West adapts. These actors treat everything as a vector — infrastructure, academia, media, tech platforms — while we still compartmentalize risk into silos like “infosec,” “disinfo,” and “espionage.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyber_warfare_forces
This many cyber armies, that much $ being invested, and they are all just sitting back doing nothing? It's still "coming"?
No no, this cyber world war has been a live war for decades now and nobody realizes?
If you get invaded, the army pushes the enemy back. Where's the cyber army defense?
bradten•8mo ago
What gets less attention is what that actually means for people who build or defend infrastructure in the West.
This piece frames the Internet not as a global commons, but as a Western frontier — open by design, under-organized by nature, and increasingly under siege by actors who don’t believe in that openness.
It argues that security professionals — especially in the West — aren’t just engineers anymore. They’re geopolitical actors, whether they like it or not.
Curious if others are seeing this shift operationally: changes in threat modeling, public-private coordination, or just more existential fatigue.