“The Salt Typhoon cyber espionage operation linked to China targeted telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon, but the companies are safe because they are cooperating with law enforcement and government officials.”, — write: epravda.com.ua
The Salt Typhoon cyber espionage operation linked to China targeted telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon, but the companies are safe because they are cooperating with law enforcement and government officials. This was announced by the companies on Saturday, acknowledging the attacks, Reuters reports. Officials previously said hackers targeted Verizon AT&T, Lumen and other telecommunications companies and stole intercepted phone audio along with large amounts of call data. In response to this cyberattack, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on December 18 called on high-ranking government and political figures to switch mobile communications to end-to-end encrypted applications. Officials associated with the presidential campaigns of Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump were reportedly targeted by the hackers. “At this time, we are not detecting any state activity on our networks. Based on our ongoing investigation into this attack, China has targeted a small number of individuals of foreign intelligence interest,” an AT&T spokesperson said. Although only a handful of data breaches have been identified, AT&T is monitoring and restoring its networks to protect customer data, and continues to work with authorities to assess and mitigate the threat, a company spokesperson said. Verizon said it did not detect any malicious activity on the network and said that over time and after considerable effort, Verizon has contained the activity associated with the incident, Verizon’s director of legal affairs said in a statement. U.S. officials on Friday added a ninth unnamed telecommunications company to a list of entities compromised by Chinese hackers and said the people involved gained access to the networks and essentially had broad and complete access that allowed them to ” geolocate millions of people, record phone calls at will.” Chinese officials previously called the allegations misinformation and said Beijing “resolutely stands up and fights against cyber-attacks and cyber-theft in all forms.”