Christopher Braccia
On October 19, 2025, China-linked hackers known as “Salt Typhoon” were detected attempting to infiltrate yet another European telecommunications provider, deploying sophisticated techniques and exploiting Citrix NetScaler Gateway vulnerabilities. The intrusion marks the latest expansion of a campaign that has already compromised telecommunications infrastructure across more than 80 countries.
The pattern is consistent: Operations first tested against ASEAN targets eventually appear in attacks against Western infrastructure, often with marginal adjustments. Yet despite mounting evidence from regional security firms and governments, Western intelligence agencies have treated Southeast Asian cyber incidents as peripheral concerns rather than early warning indicators of threats that would later target their own critical systems.
China’s Laboratory for Cyberattacks
Southeast Asia serves as Beijing’s operational testing ground, offering a diverse technology landscape ideal for stress-testing intrusion methods as well as lower risks of attribution and retaliation. Southeast Asian governments are often reluctant to publicly attribute attacks to China given economic dependencies. From Vietnam’s government networks to the Philippines’ energy sector, China’s state-linked actors exploited a region characterized by hybrid technology ecosystems to refine what would later become their most sophisticated intrusion techniques.
For Beijing, Southeast Asia has proven an ideal laboratory. For the West, it’s a missed opportunity to prepare.
The sophistication of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, their ability to persist in networks for years and evade detection, is not a fluke. It represents the culmination of iterative, low-risk research and development. This capability refinement follows clear strategic logic.
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