Even in a year of high-profile Chinese cyberattacks, the Salt Typhoon campaign has stood out.
The attack, by a Chinese government-linked hacking group dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by investigators, was first revealed in late September. The hackers infiltrated at least eight major U.S. telecommunication networks, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, targeting the cellphones of several government officials and politicians, including President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
Even in a year of high-profile Chinese cyberattacks, the Salt Typhoon campaign has stood out.
The attack, by a Chinese government-linked hacking group dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by investigators, was first revealed in late September. The hackers infiltrated at least eight major U.S. telecommunication networks, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, targeting the cellphones of several government officials and politicians, including President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
The intrusion has sent alarm bells ringing among intelligence agencies and lawmakers, with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner referring to it as the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history—by far.” Sen. Marco Rubio, the committee’s ranking member and Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, went a step further. “It’s the most disturbing and widespread incursion into our telecommunication systems in the history of the world, not just the country,” he told reporters this month. “That’s about as bad as it gets.”
Even more concerning, U.S. officials said that as of early this month, they had still not been able to expel the hackers from most of the compromised systems and were unable to give a timeline for when that would be achieved.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued guidelines on mobile phone usage for “highly targeted individuals,” which CISA official Jeff Greene said refers to “senior government or senior political officials who likely possess information of interest” to China. The agency instructed those individuals to only communicate through apps, such as........