Global Cybersecurity Under Siege: CISA and World-Wide Intelligence Agencies Issue Dire Warning About Salt Typhoon

In late August 2025, the FBI, along with international partners worldwide, including Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic, and others, issued a stark warning: a Chinese government-backed hacking campaign has expanded to target at least 200 U.S. organizations and victims in 80 countries. While state-sponsored cyber activity is nothing new, this campaign, commonly referred to as Salt Typhoon, stands out for its scale, aggressiveness, and disregard for international norms. For businesses, governments, and critical infrastructure providers, the implications are clear: cybersecurity complacency is no longer an option. The question isn’t whether you’re a target, but whether you’re prepared.

Beyond Espionage: A Campaign Without Boundaries

Traditional cyber-espionage is often narrowly focused on gathering intelligence. Salt Typhoon has gone much further. Attackers gained deep access into telecom carriers , pulling call records and even law enforcement directives, exposing not just sensitive operations but also prominent U.S. politicians. What’s more alarming is the  indiscriminate targeting  of sectors like lodging, transportation, and utilities. By embedding destructive capabilities in  power and water infrastructure , the attackers signaled their intent to go beyond espionage and potentially disrupt daily life. For organizations, this means one thing:  you don’t need to be a government contractor to end up in the crosshairs.  Any company with data, customers, or critical services could become collateral damage.  This warning is supported by the Five Eyes alliance (comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) as well as European allies, including Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Such coordination is rare, underscoring the seriousness of this campaign. But while naming and shaming matters diplomatically, it does little to keep organizations safe in the moment.  Responsibility for defense ultimately falls to individual businesses and institutions.

What the FBI Advisory Teaches Us

The FBI and CISA’s joint cybersecurity advisory outlines the attackers’ tactics and recommended countermeasures:

• Persistence & Reentry  – Hackers created multiple backdoors and reentry points, often exploiting default or outdated configurations.
• Wide-Ranging Victims  – Targets spanned telecom, energy, hospitality, and transportation.
• Supply Chain Exploits  – Trusted vendor relationships became convenient avenues of compromise.
• Ongoing Threat  – As the FBI’s Brett Leatherman warned, “Just because it was secure six months ago does not mean it is now.”

For defenders, this underscores the need for continuous visibility, proactive monitoring, and stricter access controls. The Salt Typhoon campaign highlights the urgent need for  modern security approaches  that assume every user and device is a potential threat until verified. Several strategies stand out:

1. Zero trust Security: Trust is never implicit; users and devices must be authenticated continuously.
2. Least privilege access: prevents attackers from moving laterally even if they breach one system.
3. Segmentation: ensures critical assets (like utilities or telecom core systems) are isolated.
4. Network Access Control (NAC): ensures that only trusted, compliant, and authenticated devices can connect to the network.
5. Continuous posture assessment: means that if a device becomes non-compliant or shows signs of compromise, its access can be restricted in real-time.

What Businesses Should Do Now

Every organization, large or small, needs to ask: “How resilient would we be if a campaign like Salt Typhoon came knocking?”

Here are three priorities to act on today:

1. Audit Device Access  – Identify every device connected to your network, including IoT and shadow IT.
2. Enforce Policy Continuously – Don’t assume yesterday’s security posture remains effective today. Continuous monitoring is essential.
3. Embrace Cloud-Native Security  – Complexity kills visibility. Simplify your stack with cloud-delivered, scalable enforcement that covers all users and devices everywhere.

Prevention is the New Deterrence

Salt Typhoon proves that adversaries will target not just governments, but the entire fabric of our connected world. Waiting for international coalitions to respond after the fact is not a strategy. Instead, prevention and resilience must come first. By embracing zero trust, organizations can ensure that even if attackers breach the perimeter, they won’t have free rein inside. In cybersecurity, the most powerful deterrent is not a press release-it’s an environment that attackers simply can’t exploit.