The Chinese flag flies at the Chinese Consulate in Auckland, New Zealand, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Hackers linked to the Chinese government launched a state-sponsored operation that targeted New Zealand's Parliament in 2021, the country's security minister said. (Jason Oxenham/New Zealand Herald via AP)
The Chinese flag flies at the Chinese Consulate in Auckland, New Zealand, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Hackers linked to the Chinese government launched a state-sponsored operation that targeted New Zealand’s Parliament in 2021, the country’s security minister said. (Jason Oxenham/New …
The U.S. government’s decision to mandate backdoors inside telecommunications networks created the path for China to hack Americans’ phones, according to cryptographer Matt Blaze.
Mr. Blaze, a computer scientist at Georgetown University, told lawmakers on Wednesday that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) enacted in 1994 made possible the Salt Typhoon hack of the telecom sector last year.
The law required telecom providers to make their equipment compatible with court-ordered wiretaps, which sparked fears from technologists such as Mr. Blaze.
He told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that new technology expanded the attack surface for hackers to target since the legislation became law.
“The job of the illegal eavesdropper has actually gotten significantly easier and to put it bluntly, something like Salt Typhoon was inevitable and will likely happen again unless significant changes are made to our infrastructure and our approach to protecting it,” Mr. Blaze said at a committee hearing.
Mr. Blaze said the use of wiretaps formerly meant the presence of a human in the loop but it no longer does, and China’s Typhoon hackers have seized the opportunity.
Last year, U.S. national security officials warned that China’s Typhoon hacking groups were breaching American critical infrastructure for espionage and sabotage. The Salt Typhoon hackers allegedly hit telecom companies to spy on Americans’ phones.
Mr. Blaze said the architectural safeguards of the phone systems of the 1990s no longer exist and new vulnerabilities have emerged in changes to telecom switches.
“They’re designed to be remotely programmed, configured and managed often over the internet and at the same time the backhaul for wiretaps to law enforcement is no longer through dedicated leased lines but rather through internet connections that anyone potentially could get access to,” he said at the hearing. “And there are now intermediaries that serve essentially as wiretapping clearing houses between law enforcement and telecom providers.”
National security officials know the Salt Typhoon hackers want access to wiretapped communications. The Typhoon hackers targeted information from court-authorized wiretapping requests, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Some victimized telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon, have indicated China’s hacking threat to their networks has halted, but doubt persists. AT&T and Verizon told The Washington Times in January they halted the threat.
The full picture of changes coming to the telecom sector’s equipment remains to be determined. T-Mobile told The Times the hackers did not access the content of its customers’ calls and texts, and the hackers were spotted looking to gain access via edge routing infrastructure from another telecom company.
T-Mobile said in December that not every piece of equipment that the cyberattackers encountered needed to be replaced.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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