Chinese hackers have gained access to the networks of U.S. broadband providers and obtained information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the telecom companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The hackers may have had months of access to the network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized U.S. requests for communications data, the Journal said. The hackers had also gained access to other parts of the Internet traffic.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded on Sunday that it was not aware of the attack described in the report, but said the United States had “concocted a false story” in the past to “frame” China.
“At a time when cybersecurity has become a common challenge for all countries around the world, this flawed approach will only hinder the efforts of the international community to jointly address the challenge through dialogue and cooperation,” the ministry said in a statement to Reuters.
Beijing has previously denied claims by the US government and others that it has used hackers to break into foreign computer systems.
Lumen Technologies declined to comment, while Verizon and AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Journal said the attack was carried out by a Chinese hacking group for the purpose of intelligence gathering. American researchers call it ‘Salt typhoon’.
Earlier this year, US law enforcement disrupted a major Chinese hacking group nicknamed “Flax Typhoon,” months after confronting Beijing with massive cyber espionage under a campaign dubbed “Volt Typhoon.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said in its statement that Beijing’s cybersecurity agencies had found and published evidence showing that Volt Typhoon was staged by “an international ransomware organization.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)