A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday.
Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon.
US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim had been identified after the administration released guidance to companies about how to hunt for Chinese culprits in their networks.
Photo: AP
The update from Neuberger is the latest development in a massive hacking operation that has alarmed national security officials, exposed cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the private sector and laid bare China’s hacking sophistication.
“The reality is that China is targeting critical infrastructure in the United States. Those are private sector companies, and we still see companies not doing the basics,” she said.
“That’s why we’re looking forward and saying, ‘Let’s lock down this infrastructure,’” she added. “And frankly, let’s hold the Chinese accountable for this.”
The hackers compromised the networks of telecoms to obtain customer call records and gain access to the private communications of what officials have said is a limited number of individuals. Although the FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, officials believe senior US government officials and prominent political figures are among those whose communications were accessed.
Neuberger said that officials did not yet have a precise sense how many Americans overall were affected by Salt Typhoon, in part because the Chinese were careful about their techniques, but that a “large number” were in the Washington-Virginia area.
Officials believe the goal of the hackers was to identify who owned the phones and, if they were “government targets of interest,” spy on their texts and phone calls, she said.
The FBI said most of the people targeted by the hackers are “primarily involved in government or political activity.”
The episode highlighted the need for required cybersecurity practices in the telecommunications industry, something the US Federal Communications Commission is to take up at a meeting next month, Neuberger said.
One of the nine telecoms breached involved an administrator account that had access to more than 100,000 routers, she said.
“So when the Chinese compromised that account, they gained that kind of broad access across the network. That’s not meaningful cybersecurity to defend against the nation-state actors,” she added.
The US Department of Commerce this month moved ahead with a ban of China Telecom and Neuberger said that similar actions would be released in the next month, without giving details.
“We know that voluntary cybersecurity practices are inadequate to protect against China, Russia and Iran hacking of our critical infrastructure,” she said.
The Chinese government has denied responsibility for the hacking.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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