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The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is warning that the Chinese hack into America’s telecom companies is not only worse than initially believed, but it is MAJOR, and the “most serious telecom hack in our history.”
From the New York Times: China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.
“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.
Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.
At first, the F.B.I. and other investigators believed that China’s hackers used stolen passwords to focus mostly on the system that taps telephone conversations and texts under court orders. It is administered by a number of the nation’s telecommunications firms, including the three largest — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. But in recent days, investigators have discovered how deeply China’s hackers had moved throughout the country by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks connecting disparate systems.
“This is far and away the most serious telecom hack in our history,” Sen. Warner warned on Thursday, adding, “This makes Colonial Pipeline and SolarWinds look like small potatoes.” He noted that just in the past week, it become clear that “every major provider has been broken into.”
Although the Chinese hackers seem to have “disappeared,” suspending their attack so they cannot be discovered, Warner said it would be a mistake to assume they are totally gone, and noted it is still unclear just how deeply they were embedded in America’s telecom systems.
Over the past two decades, American officials were first just concerned that the Chinese were stealing intellectual property, such as blueprints for military equipment and chip designs.
However, the Chinese have since zoned in on breaching the communications of America’s government officials and stealing security clearance files.
BREAKING: For first time, @CISA @FBI acknowledge the extent of the Chinese telecommunications hack: “We have identified that PRC-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise…
— Nick Schifrin (@nickschifrin) November 13, 2024
Today, with @FBI, we released a joint statement on malicious PRC-sponsored cyber activity targeting commercial telecommunications infrastructure. We encourage any organization that believes it might be a victim to engage its local FBI field office or CISA. https://t.co/aQlvReDB72 pic.twitter.com/62bWxdO1GV
— Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (@CISAgov) October 25, 2024
Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls Salt Typhoon “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history”
The Chinese state-affiliated hackers moved from telco network to another. They listened in real-time to calls. 1/ https://t.co/OJqY7WqzNj
— Ellen Nakashima (@nakashimae) November 21, 2024
China’s Hacking Reached Deep Into U.S. Telecoms https://t.co/zEDH246F4Y
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) November 22, 2024
BREAKING: Chinese Hackers Targeted Phones Used by Trump and Vance
NEWS ALERT: Major U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack
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