(Reuters) – A breach of telecom companies that the United States said was linked to China was “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history – by far,” the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday. told the Washington Post.
Earlier this month, U.S. officials said hackers linked to China had intercepted surveillance data for U.S. law enforcement agencies after breaching an unspecified number of telecom companies.
According to a joint statement released by the FBI and US Cyber, the hackers compromised the networks of “several telecommunications companies” and stole the call records and communications of US consumers to “a limited number of individuals who were primarily but involved in government or political activities”. Watchdog agency CISA on November 13.
Beijing has repeatedly denied claims by the US government and others that it has used hackers to break into foreign computer systems.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on Thursday night.
There were also reports that Chinese hackers targeted the telephones of then-presidential and vice-presidential candidates Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, along with other senior political figures, raising widespread concerns about the security of the US telecommunications infrastructure. .
“This is an ongoing effort by China to infiltrate telecom systems around the world, to exfiltrate large amounts of data,” Mark Warner told The Washington Post.
The breach went further than the Biden administration acknowledged, with hackers able to listen to phone conversations and read text messages, Warner said in a separate interview. The New York Times (NYSE: ).
“The warehouse door is still open, or mostly open,” he told the publication.
