Telecoms Tell Employees to Stop Looking for Evidence of Salt Typhoon Intrusion

from the if-you-ignore-the-problem-it-goes-away dept

Fri, Jun 20th 2025 05:31am - Karl Bode

Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers this happened.

Like most hacks, the scale of the intrusion was significantly worse than originally stated. Last week, insiders told NextGov that Comcast and data center giant Digital Realty were also caught up in the hack and had their systems compromised. The same insiders stated that government officials still aren’t really sure that they have a full grasp on the attack’s impact:

“Various agencies across the U.S. government are in possession of lists of confirmed or potential victims, but it’s not clear if the tallies are consistent with each other, adding to confusion about who may have been accessed, targeted or marked for investigation, one of the people said.”

But it’s this little bit in the report that I thought was of particular note:

“Inside two major U.S. telecom operators, incident response staff have been instructed by outside counsel not to look for signs of Salt Typhoon, said one of the people, declining to name the firms because the matter is sensitive.”

So big telecoms are so afraid of liability and government oversight they’ve just stopped looking for evidence of intrusion in one of the worst hacks the U.S. has ever seen. That’s sure to fix the problem.

The U.S. business press covering the hack refuse to talk about it, but a major catalyst for the hack was the steady and mindless deregulation of the U.S. telecom sector. Libertarians and right wingers, “free market” think tanks in tow, spent the better part of the last thirty years insisting that gutting all meaningful state and federal oversight would result in vast, near-Utopian outcomes.

Instead, freed of both pesky competition and competent oversight, major U.S. telecoms saw zero incentive to compete on price, shore up spotty access, improve quality, or even consistently, adequately invest in privacy and security standards. The results are everywhere you look, from sloppy handling of consumer location data, to companies like T-Mobile being hacked eight times in five years.

And this was all before the Trump 2.0 authoritarians came to town. Now, we’re disemboweling our telecom and cybersecurity regulators at a much faster rate, stocking our regulators with weird, incompetent, and unqualified zealots, and building a court system in which it’s genuinely impossible for telecom giants to see any sort of real-world accountability for fraud or incompetence.

Again, the second Trump administration is utterly indistinguishable from a foreign attack. Because it’s dressed up in so much domestic religious and pseudo-populist propaganda and bullshit, it’s in many ways worse.

Filed Under: broadband, china, deregulation, hacked, national security, privacy, salt typhoon, security, spying, surveillance, telecom