China Catch-All | Massive telecommunications hack of the US carried out by China

[altmin]

China Wiretaps Americans in 'Worst Hack in Our Nation's History'

America's aging infrastructure seems to be the culprit.

gizmodo.com

Hackers for the Chinese government were able to deeply penetrate U.S. telecommunications infrastructure in ways that President Joe Biden’s administration hasn’t yet acknowledged, according to new reports from the Washington Post and New York Times. The hackers were able to listen to phone calls and read text messages, reportedly exploiting the system U.S. authorities use to wiretap Americans in criminal cases. The worst part? The networks are still compromised and it may take incredibly drastic measures to boot them from U.S. systems.


The hackers behind the infiltration of U.S. telecom infrastructure are known to Western intelligence agencies as Salt Typhoon, and this particular breach of U.S. equipment was first reported in early October by the Wall Street Journal. But Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, spoke with the Washington Post and New York Times this week to warn the public that this is so much worse than we initially thought, dubbing it “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history.” And those articles based on Warner’s warnings were published late Thursday.

Warner is chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and a former venture capitalist who bet big on telecom in the 1980s and 90s, making him uniquely qualified to talk about threats to U.S. communications infrastructure. And he says it’s really bad. “My hair’s on fire,” Warner told the Post.

Hackers weren’t able to monitor or intercept anything encrypted, according to the Times, which means that conversations over apps like Signal and Apple’s iMessage were probably protected. But end-to-end encryption over texts between Apple devices and Android devices, for instance, aren’t encrypted in the same way, meaning they were vulnerable to interception by Salt Typhoon, according to the Times.

 

[OGtruthhurts]

I have a very close friend who works high up in cyber security for uncle sam. He's says its just a matter of time before we are crippled because we are too care more with spending hundreds of billions building planes and ships instead of spending on keeping the best IT minds. Huge govt contracts rules the USA.

 

[theel4life]

Don’t care.

 

[superrific]

I have a very close friend who works high up in cyber security for uncle sam. He's says its just a matter of time before we are crippled because we are too care more with spending hundreds of billions building planes and ships instead of spending on keeping the best IT minds. Huge govt contracts rules the USA.

If he's high up in cyber security, he really shouldn't be talking to you like this.

 

[OGtruthhurts]

If he's high up in cyber security, he really shouldn't be talking to you like this.

Hes not sharing anything that requires any clearance, Einstein

 

[Paine]

Almost like having the intelligence apparatus build back doors to spy on Americans was a mistake.

 

[superrific]

Hes not sharing anything that requires any clearance, Einstein

He shouldn't be sharing anything. People don't need to know that a cyber security specialist high up in the government thinks our cyber defenses are garbage. That's valuable information. Maybe anyone who would value this information already knows it, but it's still not something that should be blabbed around.

 

[superrific]

Almost like having the intelligence apparatus build back doors to spy on Americans was a mistake.

This breach has nothing to do with that. This is an aging infrastructure problem, and it's hardware based.

 

[Paine]

This breach has nothing to do with that. This is an aging infrastructure problem, and it's hardware based.

My bad. Should’ve read the article before commenting based on this: “The hackers were able to listen to phone calls and read text messages, reportedly exploiting the system U.S. authorities use to wiretap Americans in criminal cases.”

 

[heelslegup]

Gene Hackman to Will Smith in Enemy of the State (1998): "Stay off the phone!"

 

[superrific]

My bad. Should’ve read the article before commenting based on this: “The hackers were able to listen to phone calls and read text messages, reportedly exploiting the system U.S. authorities use to wiretap Americans in criminal cases.”

Yes, a system that has been around for a very long time. Our telephone infrastructure is leaky because it is old.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[BlooVooDoo]

Maybe Trump will offer Taiwan a chance to become a US territory. He‘s not likely to do anything militarily to help them.

 

[05C40]

Maybe Trump will offer Taiwan a chance to become a US territory. He‘s not likely to do anything militarily to help them.

If such a scenario actually transpired, St. Donald of Mar-a-Lago would immediately sell Taiwan to China and, presumably, collect some sort of fee for facilitating the sale. A fee similar--in kind, if not amount--to what he anticipates collecting on the upcoming property transfers to the US of Greenland, Panama Canal, and Canada. St. Donald of Mar-a-Lago has more experience that all the other US Presidents combined in how to make money off driving a previously thriving enterprise into the ground.be

ETA: I assume the key selling point in "acquiring" Canada and Greenland is to gain sovereignty over of the upcoming North-West passage between East Asia and Northern Europe, now that the long-range strategy of excessive Greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., Global Warming, is finally becoming clear. I assume that St. Donald plans to "flip" the Panama Canal to some unsuspecting rube before this "North-West" passage becomes the preferred route.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

Many of the techbros influencing the Trump Admin seem to share a similar dream with Trump - build a new, modern city from the ground up.

 

[altmin]

China’s Salt Typhoon Spies Are Still Hacking Telecoms—Now by Exploiting Cisco Routers

Despite high-profile attention and even US sanctions, the group hasn’t stopped or even slowed its operation, including the breach of two more US telecoms.

www.wired.com

When the Chinese hacker group known as Salt Typhoon was revealed last fall to have deeply penetrated major US telecommunications companies—ultimately breaching no fewer than nine of the phone carriers and accessing Americans' texts and calls in real time—that hacking campaign was treated as a four-alarm fire by the US government. Yet even after those hackers' high-profile exposure, they've continued their spree of breaking into telecom networks worldwide, including more in the US.

Researchers at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future on Wednesday night revealed in a report that they've seen Salt Typhoon breach five telecoms and internet service providers around the world, as well as more than a dozen universities from Utah to Vietnam, all between December and January. The telecoms include one US internet service provider and telecom firm and another US-based subsidiary of a UK telecom, according to the company's analysts, though they declined to name those victims to WIRED.

...

Recorded Future found more than 12,000 Cisco devices whose web interfaces were exposed online, and says that the hackers targeted more than a thousand of those devices installed in networks worldwide. Of those, they appear to have focused on a smaller subset of telecoms and university networks whose Cisco devices they successfully exploited. For those selected targets, Salt Typhoon configured the hacked Cisco devices to connect to the hackers' own command-and-control servers via generic routing encapsulation, or GRE tunnels—a protocol used to set up private communications channels—then used those connections to maintain their access and steal data.