Three private Chinese companies helped China carry out one of the boldest hacking operations to date, including snooping on text messages from Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s campaigns, according to a coalition of U.S. agencies and 12 allied governments.
The operation, known as Salt Typhoon, hacked into telecommunication companies around the world, including AT&T and Verizon last year, allowing it to potentially access text and telephone communications between millions of people and track their locations.
A 37-page technical report released Wednesday was signed by the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as intelligence and law enforcement bodies from Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, among others. It said the campaign, which has been going on since 2021, also targeted government, transportation, lodging and military infrastructure networks around the world.
An FBI spokesperson said in an emailed statement that Salt Typhoon has hacked more than 200 companies across 80 countries.
NBC News reported in July that the Defense Department quietly concluded this year that Salt Typhoon had also broken into at least one state’s National Guard network for nearly a year before it was detected.
The three companies that have been helping China’s Ministry of State Security in the campaign are Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology, Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology and Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology.
While the Treasury Department sanctioned the Sichuan-based Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology over Salt Typhoon activity in January, Western governments had not previously accused the two other companies of global hacking operations.
Little information about the companies is available online, and they could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Chinese government has denied involvement in overseas hacking activities and has accused the U.S. and its allies of similar behavior.
It is remarkable that the three firms appeared to be actually functioning companies, not merely fronts for Chinese intelligence, said Dakota Cary, a China analyst at the cybersecurity company SentinelOne.
“Which means the MSS [Ministry of State Security] effectively used three private companies working in collaboration to hit some of the most important collection targets on the planet,” Cary told NBC News.
“It is inconceivable the U.S. would ask a private company to hack Xi’s phone,” he added, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While Salt Typhoon does not exclusively hack telecommunications companies, it has proven remarkably adept at doing so. Its hack of AT&T and Verizon alone gave China access to phone data on more than a million people in the Washington, D.C., area.
That kind of access gives intelligence agencies the potential not only to spy on phone calls and text messages, but also to track people’s locations, the report found.
“The data stolen through this activity against foreign telecommunications and Internet service providers (ISPs), as well as intrusions in the lodging and transportation sectors, ultimately can provide Chinese intelligence services with the capability to identify and track their targets’ communications and movements around the world,” it said.
AT&T and Verizon have said they have removed the hackers from their systems, although they remain vulnerable to being broken into again.
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