China hack enabled vast spying on US officials
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Hackers linked to Chinese intelligence used precision strikes to quietly compromise cellphone lines used by an array of senior national security and policy officials across the U.S. government in addition to politicians, according to people familiar with the matter.
This access allowed them to scoop up call logs, unencrypted texts and some audio from potentially thousands of Americans and others with whom they interacted. The emerging picture of the intrusion’s reach helps confirm the intelligence community’s concerns about the potentially dire national security consequences of the attack, the people said. Hackers burrowed deep into U.S.
telecommunications infrastructure over eight months or more. With each layer of network infrastructure they unlocked, the Beijing-linked group studied how America’s communications wiring works without detection, carrying out targeted thefts, people familiar with the breach said. The newly uncovered espionage campaign, earlier reported in September by The Wall Street Journal, is the latest in a long string of successes for China’s government hackers, as Western governments accuse Beijing of spying at an unprecedented scale.
But as U.S. officials and security experts piece together what the hackers—part of a group nicknamed Salt Typhoon by investigators—were able to achieve, they have assembled clues that fuel concerns that China’s mastery of cyber-espionage is dangerously advanced. 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—a group that includes AT&T and Verizon—but limited their targets to several dozen select, high-value political and national-security
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