It has been confirmed by FBI that the China hacked multiple telecom firms to steal data on US politicians.
A statement has been issued by the FBI that says a ‘dubbed Salt Typhoon’, a Chinese hacking group, may have catch sight of phones that belongs to incoming US President Donald Trump and VP JD Vance. FBI joined the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to describe that the Chinese hacking activities is “a broad and significant cyber espionage campaign” in which several dozen political and national security figures were ultimately on the target list.
“Specifically, 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 of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to US law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders”, said by the agency in one of the statements.
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The effort to copy law enforcement requests suggests that how the network infrastructure that ISPs such as AT&T and Verizon use to answer court-authorized wiretapping requests has been allegedly tried by the Chinese hackers to be accessed.
Cell phone lines have been successfully hacked by the Chinese hackers that belong to a number of senior national security and policy officials. “The hackers appeared to have had the ability to access the phone data of virtually any American who is a customer of a compromised carrier,” reported by the Wall Street Journal.
An investigation done by the FBI had not been elaborated but there’s a clear evidence that the software flaws have been exploited by the Chinese hackers and China hacked multiple telecom firms to spy phones of US politicians. For now, FBI only said that “We expect our understanding of these compromises to grow as the investigation continues.”
