Multiple U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, have been breached by a Chinese hacking group tracked as Salt

AT&T, Verizon reportedly hacked to target US govt wiretapping platform

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2024-10-07 15:00:04

Multiple U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, have been breached by a Chinese hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The purpose of the attack appears to be for intelligence collection as the hackers might have had access to systems used by the U.S. federal government for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

It is unclear when the intrusion occurred, but WSJ cites people familiar with the matter, saying that "for months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data."

Salt Typhoon is the name that Microsoft gave to this particular China-based threat actor. Other cybersecurity companies are tracking the adversary as Earth Estries (Trend Micro), FamousSparrow (ESET), Ghost Emperor (Kaspersky), and UNC2286 (Mandiant, now part of Google Cloud).

According to the WSJ, the attack was discovered in recent weeks and is being investigated by the U.S. government and security experts in the private sector.