White House Confirms: Ninth American Telecommunications Company Targeted by China's Espionage Operation

A senior White House official confirmed on December 28 that China's extensive espionage operation, known as "Salt Storm," has targeted another telecommunications company in the U.S., marking it as the ninth victim of this operation. Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technologies, stated, "The attackers targeted the telecommunications companies' networks to access customer call records and gain access to private conversations of specific individuals." She added that many of the victims of this operation reside in the Washington and Virginia area, and the hackers aimed to identify phone owners and spy on messages and calls of government targets. The Biden administration had previously announced that at least eight U.S. telecommunications companies had been affected by these attacks. Despite the FBI's refusal to disclose the identities of the victims, reports indicate that senior government officials and prominent political figures were among the targets of the Chinese hackers. Last week, Democratic Senator Ben Ray Lujan stated that this attack is likely the largest telecommunications hack in U.S. history. China's extensive espionage operation, known as "Salt Storm," has allowed Chinese officials access to the messages and private conversations of an unspecified number of American citizens. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recently urged senior government and political officials to quickly use messaging services with "end-to-end encryption." This request came after a widespread breach of major U.S. telecommunications networks, attributed to Chinese hackers. End-to-end encryption is a method for protecting data that allows only the sender and receiver of a message to read it, making messages and information unreadable to anyone else. This feature is present in various messaging applications such as WhatsApp owned by Meta, iMessage owned by Apple, and the privacy-focused Signal app. Additionally, corporate applications like Microsoft Teams also have this capability. U.S. officials hold China responsible for these hacks, while Beijing typically denies allegations of cyber espionage.