John Sexton writes at HotAir.com about new developments in a disturbing story involving the incoming president.
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 U.S. 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replacing “literally thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment across the country,” specifically outdated routers and switches, Warner said.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.
