Chinese hackers have breached dozens of telecommunications companies around the world. The breach, christened Salt Typhoon by Microsoft cybersecurity researchers, has afforded the cybercriminals unprecedented access not only to information on who has been texting or calling whom and when, but also on the contents of some messages, a much higher technical bar to clear in a cyber-attack.
The cyber-attack hit three of the largest telecommunications networks in the US. The communications of government officials in Washington DC have been intercepted, as have internet browsing records kept by the same telecommunications companies. The hackers attempted and may have succeeded to crack the phones of Donald Trump and JD Vance as well as Kamala Harris’s campaign staff. Even the US’s wiretapping program was breached; call records stored there were stolen. A US senator called it the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history”. The same week, UK telecom giant BT announced it had endured “an attempt to compromise” its conferencing service and circumvented it.
The group of hackers, sometimes known as FamousSparrow, has been active since 2020 and has gone after government organizations in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Canada, Guatemala and Burkina Faso in the past, according to cybersecurity firm Eset. It has another favorite target, one it has targeted even more aggressively than governments in the past: hotels. In all of those countries as well as the UK, France, Lithuania and Taiwan, the group has hounded the digital systems of hotels and stolen their data.
Salt Typhoon has been under way for one to two years and is ongoing, according to US intelligence. US analysts have attributed the cyber-attack to Beijing, as have independent cybersecurity researchers. China denies involvement.
MORE:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/09/why-did-china-hack-the-worlds-phone-networks