Shattered Signals: A Web of Deceit – Uncovering the Shadow War of US and Chinese Cyber Spies

Hackers linked to the Chinese government have breached the networks of a number of broadband service providers in the United States, and may have gained access to information from systems used by the US federal government to carry out wiretaps authorized by judicial warrants. This was reported by the “Wall Street Journal” newspaper, according to which the hackers may have maintained “for months or even longer” access to the network infrastructure used to cooperate with US authorities’ requests for communications data as part of investigations of criminal and security importance, with a potentially very serious risk to national security.

According to the sources cited by the newspaper, the hackers also obtained access to other, more generic internet traffic flows. The intrusion allegedly affected the networks of large telecommunications and network service providers Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies. According to sources cited by the “Wall Street Journal”, this is a “potentially catastrophic” security breach, which the US authorities attribute to the Chinese hacker group nicknamed “Salt Typhoon”. The cyber attack and its scale were only discovered in recent weeks, and are currently the subject of an active investigation by the US government and private sector security analysts.