Top telecom CEOs met with US national security authorities on Friday, raising worries about a long-running Chinese cyber-espionage effort targeting some of the country’s most senior political people.
The hackers dug deep into certain major US telecom carriers to spy on phone calls and text messages, and they have proven difficult to remove from some networks, according to sources familiar with the situation.
The talks provided an opportunity for telecom CEOs to advise the government on how to strengthen its defenses against sophisticated hackers, according to the White House. The organizations also shared intelligence about the operation with one another.
The attack is shaping up to be one of the most significant cyber and national security concerns for the incoming Trump administration.
It is “by far” the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history,” Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chairman of the intelligence committee, told AWN.
However, the exact scale of the incident, including who was affected and the impact on national security, is still being probed.
According to Warner, the FBI has alerted less than 150 victims, the most of whom reside in the Washington, DC region. However, all of those victims had most certainly contacted or texted many persons, implying that the hackers have obtained far more records. According to Warner, the hackers may listen in on individual targets’ calls for a certain duration.
US agencies and private cyber experts are keeping track of the number of telecom breaches. AWN earlier revealed that US broadband and internet companies AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen had all been targeted in the hacking effort.
AWN earlier claimed that the hackers targeted the phone communications of prominent officials in both the Republican and Democratic parties, including President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Eric Trump.
China has disputed the hacking accusations.
US intelligence services have extensive hacking capabilities and have targeted China’s telecommunications sector, according to papers obtained by former National Security Agency worker Edward Snowden over a decade ago.
For years, US officials have warned about China’s hacking program, which FBI Director Christopher Wray said is larger than the combined efforts of all other major countries.
However, such warnings have become more serious in the last year as fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan have risen.
Chinese government-linked hackers “will not and are not stopping because it is part of their overarching national objectives and cyber has become one of their most powerful levers of national power,” Morgan Adamski, executive director of US Cyber Command, the military’s offensive and defensive cyber unit, stated in a speech on Friday.
The US government, including Cyber Command, has conducted offensive and defensive operations aimed at “degrading and disrupting” China’s cyber operations abroad, Adamski stated at the CYBERWARCON conference in Arlington, Virginia.