That's the surprising conclusion of Dakota Cary, a researcher at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne and the Atlantic Council, who, like many security analysts, has closely tracked the Chinese state-sponsored hacker group known as Salt Typhoon. Salt Typhoon has come to be known, in fact, for its sophisticated hacking of network devices—including those sold by Cisco, the world's biggest networking company. He found the names of two partial owners of contract firms linked to Salt Typhoon in a recent US government advisory about the group. Those names—Qiu Daibing and Yu Yang—also appeared in university records, showing that students with the same two names had, years earlier, placed in the Cisco Networking Academy Cup, a competition designed to test participants on the knowledge taught in Cisco's Networking Academy training program. “It's just wild that you could go from that corporate-sponsored training environment into offense against that same company,” Cary says, describing his theory.