Chinese hackers gained access to huge trove of Americans’ cell records
PoliticoThe possible theft of cell records pertaining to millions of Americans has become one of the leading concerns for investigators as they struggle to evict Salt Typhoon from some of the nation’s leading phone companies. The Biden administration first acknowledged it was investigating “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure” by Chinese hackers two weeks ago. By burrowing inside at least 10 major phone providers, including Verizon, AT&T and Lumen, Salt Typhoon was able to eavesdrop on unencrypted communications from the phones of dozens of senior U.S. political figures, including President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, the New York Times reported last month. Salt Typhoon has embedded itself inside often-aging networking equipment, including routers and switches, that do not run the Windows operating system and are hard for digital forensics experts to probe, the second person said.