Scope of State-Supported Hacker Infiltration Sounds Alarms

If 2025 seems like it has been a quiet year for major outages and high-profile company downtime your intuition is correct.  There have been fewer major corporate outages this year.  Additionally, this summer we calculated the number of service provider and outages reported by industry observers for the first six months of the year and noted they were well behind last year’s figures.  

But complacency can be a dangerous thing and the relatively quiet year we’re enjoying with outages should not lull you to sleep.  Organizations should constantly be on alert when it comes to their uptime, compliance, and information security, as threats are out there.  

On September 29 The New York Times reported on the threat posed by Salt Typhoon, China’s years-long program of hacking, stealing of data and personal information authorized by China’s Ministry of State Security.   They almost certainly have your personal information and likely have malware layered into infrastructure supporting applications, networks, and services that you use daily. 

The scope of the operation is jarring, and if you’ve let a mindset of “we’re not really an attractive target” seep into your operations you will likely choose to redouble your vigilance after reading this article.   Using public cloud doesn't alleviate the need for a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan.  The biggest targets of the hacking teams, both state-sponsored, are major cloud networks like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and the like.

A well-thought-out disaster recovery plan seems more important than ever before.   For perspectives on DR strategies to maintain uptime for your organization download the Direct LTx white paper Maintaining High Availability: 9 Critical Steps to Take for Disaster Recovery Success.   

If you have trouble keeping your employees’ attention on InfoSec best practices the Times article would likely be a good read for them.  If you have any questions about DR and failover strategies you can always reach out to us at strategy@directLTx.com.