U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack

'A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers,' reports the Wall Street Journal, 'potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

'For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk.'

The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said. Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the people said.

The widespread compromise is considered a potentially catastrophic security breach and was carried out by a sophisticated Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon. It appeared to be geared toward intelligence collection, the people said... The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn't be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach...

The hackers appear to have engaged in a vast collection of internet traffic from internet service providers that count businesses large and small, and millions of Americans, as their customers. Additionally, there are indications that the hacking campaign targeted a small number of service providers outside the U.S., the people said. A person familiar with the attack said the U.S. government considered the intrusions to be historically significant and worrisome... 'It will take time to unravel how bad this is, but in the meantime it's the most significant in a long string of wake-up calls that show how the PRC has stepped up their cyber game,' said Brandon Wales, former executive director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and now a vice president at SentinelOne, referring to the People's Republic of China. 'If companies and governments weren't taking this seriously before, they absolutely need to now.'

Three weeks ago TechCrunch also reported that the FBI 'took control of a botnet made up of hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices, such as cameras, video recorders, storage devices, and routers, which was run by a Chinese government hacking group, FBI director Christopher Wray and U.S. government agencies revealed Wednesday.

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