PNN – After holding a security meeting in the White House, American intelligence officials expressed concern about the widespread influence of Chinese hackers in the telecommunications and Internet networks of the United States and demanded to deal with it.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network from the New York Times, the top officials of major American telecommunications companies attended this place yesterday Friday at the invitation of the White House to discuss the security challenge of the federal government, that is, how to expel Chinese hackers from the deepest corners of the country’s communication networks.
In this meeting, which was held under the chairmanship of White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and some of his deputies, the participants expressed their concern about the discovery of massive hacking by Chinese agents. The people present at this meeting believed that hackers from a group called “Salt Typhoon”, which, according to American officials, has close ties to China’s Ministry of State Security, have been lurking in the networks of the largest American telecommunications companies for more than a year.
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Several knowledgeable officials present at this meeting, who asked not to be named for security reasons, announced that Chinese hackers have an almost complete list of phone numbers that the Ministry of Justice monitors on the basis of a legal wiretapping system of possible criminals or spies.
According to people present at yesterday’s White House meeting, although US government officials do not believe that the Chinese have listened in on these calls, the hackers may have combined phone numbers with geolocation data and obtained detailed information about the individuals under surveillance.
According to the New York Times, as a result of this infiltration, China has obtained a roadmap to know which Chinese spies the US has identified.
American officials first believed that the hack was limited to the area around Washington. But now, based on evidence, China has gained access to all telephone networks across the country, and they have been able to read some emails by infiltrating internet service providers.
At the White House meeting, the final message from top intelligence and national security officials was that while the technology is old, American telecommunications companies should help find a permanent solution aimed at keeping Beijing’s agents out of telecommunications systems. At the same time, some officials believe that such an action requires taking major corrective steps that can cause many outages in the network for consumers.