The Chinese Telecom Hack Was Much Worse Than We’ve Been Told

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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replacing “literally thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment across the country,” specifically outdated routers and switches, Warner said.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.”

The hackers were not able to listen to conversations on encrypted applications, like those carried over WhatsApp or Signal. Nor could they read encrypted messages, such as those sent from one iPhone to another over Apple’s iMessage system. But they could read regular text messages between an iPhone and an Android phone, for example, or listen to phone calls over the ordinary telephone networks, much as the government can if it has a legal order.

The Chinese went after the conversations of national security officials, politicians and some of their staff, investigators have concluded. There may have been several Chinese groups at work, said a senior official involved in the investigation, who noted that one of them might have focused on Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance.

As for the hackers themselves, they have gone dark, though Sen. Warner believes they are still in parts of our telecom system and hoping to avoid drawing attention to that fact while the heat is on.

U.S. officials said that since the hack was exposed, the Chinese intruders had seemingly disappeared, suspending their intrusion so their full activity could not be discovered. But Mr. Warner said it would be wrong to conclude that the Chinese had been ousted from the nation’s telecommunications system, or that investigators even understood how deeply they were embedded.

“We’ve not found everywhere they are,” Mr. Warner said.

He said that removing them completely could take a long time as it will require replacing a lot of outdated equipment.

“This is massive, and we have a particularly vulnerable system,” Warner said. “Unlike some of the European countries where you might have a single telco, our networks are a hodgepodge of old networks. … The big networks are combinations of a whole series of acquisitions, and you have equipment out there that’s so old it’s unpatchable.”

So the bottom line is that the Chinese government was probably listening in on Trump’s calls and reading his texts during some portion of the past year. They probably had the same access to J.D. Vance’s phone plus another 150 or so people, nearly all of them connected to the US government. 

This is obviously unacceptable and there ought to be some sort of proportional response for an intrusion like this. China has been stealing our secrets and our private information for too long. At some point we need to smack their hand hard enough that they learn to stop.