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About a month ago we learned that Chinese hackers had targeted the phones of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. The hackers, dubbed “Salt Typhoon” were known to have targeted their phones, along with the phones of other government figures, however it wasn’t known exactly how far they got. Yesterday, Sen. Mark R. Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said this was the worst telecom hack in US history.
The networks are still compromised, and booting the hackers out could involve physically replacing “literally thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment across the country,” specifically outdated routers and switches, Warner said.
“This is an ongoing effort by China to infiltrate telecom systems around the world, to exfiltrate huge amounts of data,” he said.
The Salt Typhoon telecom breach makes Colonial Pipeline and SolarWinds — major cyberattacks linked, respectively, to Russian-speaking criminals and to the Russian government — “look like child’s play,” Warner said.
One thing which we’ve apparently learned only recently is that the hackers were able to listen to calls and read text messages, at least between some phones.
.only in the past week had it become clear that “every major provider has been broken into.
