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FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'
- roscas 1y agoMeanwhile in Europe, dump politics do nothing to stop USA and PRC spy. The ban for anti-social networks to less 16yo is a good start but it does not fix the smartphone or telecommunication spy. The need to ban twitter, tiktok, facebook and many others is a must.
- nickslaughter02 1y ago[flagged]
- bilbo0s 1y agoHey, do what you have to do. We will. Can't speak for every American, but I won't take offense. It's our job to protect our infrastructure, corporations and data. Not at all the responsibility of Europe, India or China. It's your job to protect yours.
- backscratches 1y agoThis hack was an example of the USA giving a backdoor to China. I wish Europe would help the US.
- ronsor 1y agoDon't think that'll stop the NSA/CIA or CCP hackers much.
- roscas 1y agoIt does not stop, that is correct. But it is a first important step to start breaking some bad ones.
- impossiblefork 1y agoThis is one of the most humiliating aspects of living here: That the government is unwilling to genuinely protect its own interests, for example, by preventing ordinary people's data from leaking abroad or ensuring real internet privacy, because without these things we are so unbelievably vulnerable, not just to influence operations designed with this data, but they'll know literally the whole economic structure of the EU, how many people work where, where a particular person works, etc. They're not even preventing foreign countries from getting access to bank transactions. When they're denied they cry terrorism, but reality is that if you have this knowledge you can say 'Oh, impossibleFork just moved to X, and he's an expert in Y, he's probably doing Z and W. Let's hire some guys to try the exact same thing, so that it'll be a business here instead of there'. I don't understand how a government can expect the country it governs to have an economy when it allows this kind of data leakage.
- 737min 1y agoA better title would be “Chinese Communist Party” or “China” pwned nearly every American… This is a state, not a school computer club.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoMore like "US government demands doors be left unlocked, Chinese Communist Party walked in"
- mensetmanusman 1y agoUS government demands doors exist. CCP finds keys.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoand Technologists scream "we told you not to install the doors!"
- backscratches 1y ago"We told you not to install doors on the space station, its extremely dangerous pressure-wise and entrances need to be particularly well designed because its in space..." "We installed a door so that any american police officer could enter the space station whenever they want. Too bad it imploded and all of the air escaped. "
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoThen it would be flagged removed for having forbidden words in the title.
- knotimpressed 1y agoTitles can’t contain “China”?
- Citizen8396 1y ago
- voidfunc 1y agoOh goodie
- fidotron 1y agoThe CISA announcement, which contains a lot more substance, was posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065458
- mullingitover 1y agoMan, good thing Doge and MAGA gutted 30% of that agency[1]. We certainly don't need a bunch of bureaucrats doing (checks notes) cybersecurity and infrastructure security right now. [1] https://archive.is/20250603190111/https://www.axios.com/2025/06/03/cisa-staff-layoffs-resignations-trump-cuts https://archive.is/20250603190111/https://www.axios.com/2025...
- DaSHacka 1y agoI mean, clearly they weren't very effective anyway.
- qnleigh 1y agoThese were intrusions into private companies.
- beeflet 1y agoSo what is funding the government going to do then? At some point you have to make people responsible for their own computer systems.
- conception 1y agoSo we definitely should just give up and not do anything instead. That makes sense.
- beeflet 1y agoYeah, defund the government spying apparatus if it isn't useful
- user_7832 1y ago> This indiscriminate targeting, as the FBI and White House security officials have previously noted, allowed Beijing’s snoops to geo-locate millions of mobile phone users, monitor their internet traffic, and, in some cases, record their phone calls. Victims reportedly included President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Welp... that's quite a capable piece of surveillance. I imagined it involved tapping to cell towers/cell infrastructure, but the details at the wikipedia page [1] suggest servers were hacked instead? Did they hack AT&T servers or something? Side note, are there any ways to not get your data stolen in such cases? I would imagine using only a VPN might help, but if they're getting data from triangulation you couldn't do much short of turning off your phone, right? 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon#Methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon#Methodology
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y agoAlmost as if having GDPR to keep at least the worst of the data-brokering/selling industry out is a good thing. The more detailed report someone posted does sound like this was hacked at the source, but a lot of the data can be bought legally on the open, not-even-too-grey market. Some journalists bought one of the location data sets and used it to demonstrate that you can identify intelligence agency employees from it (if someone spends almost every workday at one site belonging to the agency, occasionally visits the other one... the other place that "anonymous" user spends a lot of time at is likely the home of an intelligence agency employee). If the industry wasn't selling it to anyone who asks, they'd still likely keep it in easily hacked places.
- MSFT_Edging 1y agoHaving any piece of the "Data Broker" industry not completely dismantled is not only a security risk but an affront to humanity.
- fsagx 1y ago> Victims reportedly included President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance I wish the journalist had been a little cheeky and tried to get a quote from Angela Merkel.
- phyzome 1y agoPresumably this includes SMS-based MFA codes.
- mrtesthah 1y agoSalt Typhoon used govt-mandated backdoors to spy on Americans. As a result the govt told Americans to use Signal rather than rely on the phone system. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/17/nx-s1-5223490/text-messaging-security-fbi-chinese-hackers-security-encryption https://www.npr.org/2024/12/17/nx-s1-5223490/text-messaging-...
- rozab 1y agoRelevant excerpt: >The FBI and CISA raised the alarm two months after The Wall Street Journal reported that hackers linked to the Chinese government have broken into systems that enable U.S. law enforcement agencies to conduct electronic surveillance operations under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). >"These are for legitimate wiretaps that have been authorized by the courts," Hong says. But in hackers' hands, he says, the tools could potentially be used "to surveil communications and metadata for lots of people. And it seems like the [hackers'] focus is primarily Washington, D.C."
- DrillShopper 1y agoJust like they were warned repeatedly and loudly by the cypherpunks and anybody who had two functioning brain cells to rub together.
- oa335 1y ago> What this really underscores is that what the PRC is doing through these proxy actors is really reckless and unbounded, in a way that is significantly outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space," What norms are he referring to?
- drob518 1y agoYea, I wasn’t aware that there was a rule book for spies. I thought the only rule was “anything goes, but don’t get caught.” But perhaps I’m uninformed.
- Telemakhos 1y agoGiven that the US intelligence community, with PRISM and Upstream and the like, hoovers up all the world's communications, I think the "norms" must be "nobody except the US was able to do this until now." Now China has shown that it can compete in the same space.
- hammock 1y agoWestern intelligence plus Israel* And yeah pretty much. I don’t know anything about anything but it feels like there is a hierarchy (norm? At least what they are trying to enforce) of US > Five Eyes > other Western Intel (France, etc) > Pakistan/Russia/Etc > China/North Korea/Iran; and Israel falls somewhere in that mix as a maverick. Of course in practice it doesn’t work out this way. Reminds me of the recent news that the US will ban Chinese components from undersea cables, globally: https://asia.nikkei.com/content/99550c9ade243fe057e8a2ba6f293fb2 https://asia.nikkei.com/content/99550c9ade243fe057e8a2ba6f29...
- mensetmanusman 1y agoIsrael is a part of western intelligence. Adding them as your main response is strange.
- lazide 1y agoNotably, Israel is not actually located anywhere near the physical ‘west’.
- nekitamo 1y agoThis is what we get for installing mandatory government backdoors all over our communications infrastructure. Unbelievable that such a critical piece of infrastructure wasn't secured properly. But after the OPM hack and the bungled implementation of CIA "drop sites" online, nothing about our government's cyber incompetence surprises me anymore.
- dlcarrier 1y agoI'm really tempted to stop using phone numbers, altogether. The security is really bad, and phone numbers are used for identification almost as often as social security numbers, but there's no requirement to have one.
- jacquesm 1y agoTechnically not. But not having a working phone number will quickly become a problem when you need to interact with authorities, banks, insurance companies, the legal system etc. I remember when cell phones were becoming affordable and I thought I was clever by ditching my land line. That got me no end of trouble, then bit by bit it became more normalized to the point that if you have a landline now people look at you a little funny. Not having a phone number today would be the same as not having a landline would have been in the early 90's, and probably much worse than not having a phone was back then.
- toofy 1y agodo we have other sources for this other than just this government’s? i absolutely believe it may have happened, but due to overwhelming and well documented history of lies from this regime, i’d feel like i was standing on more solid footing with this if we had some reputable 3rd party sources. ideally someone who is far away from the hysterical levels of partisanship our current leaders have planted themselves. again, i’m not in denial that it couldnt have happened, it’s just that unfortunately i think it would be unreasonable to trust anything from this regime’s people. and to reiterate, they have a long and very well documented history of outright lying. not even typical politician half truths, but shoving it in our face lying.
- bb88 1y agoVerizon says they targeted certain politicians. https://www.verizon.com/about/salt-typhoon-matter-update https://www.verizon.com/about/salt-typhoon-matter-update
- christophilus 1y agoAnecdote, but I have a friend in cybersecurity in Australia, and he was telling me a few months ago that China basically has almost all the data they could want on almost all of the US.
- michael1999 1y agoThe security community warned that making Lawful Access easy and automated would guarantee that bad people would penetrate the network. And now we have China using CALEA-crippled systems to slurp up the entire USA network. Exactly as predicted. And this - "outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space" - LOL. ROTFL even. The NSA tapped Google's backbone! Have we forgotten Room 641A? MAINWAY? Poindexter and TIA? Palantir? The NSA used to play defence and offence, and has gone full-offence for a generation. Did anyone really believe that only the USA could play offence? Morons.
- dvno42 1y agoSo what was the actual point of compromise? Was it a CALEA supporting software vendor? My guess is a common MD (Mediator device) vendor was targeted that was used by many carriers but that's speculation on my part. Context for others, there's a small number of software vendors that make these MD devices that handle initiating a capture of a flow (a wiretapping request) and managing the chain of custody for a pcap. MDs usually sends an SNMP poll to a router/switch to start a (r)span port and the MD device slurps up all data and saves it. Anyway, what I'm curious about is if it's the MDs that were taken over and if it was one manufacturer but I'm not seeing much technical info on all these reports. Here's some context for "LI" for those interested: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst9600/software/release/17-12/configuration_guide/sec/b_1712_sec_9600_cg/configuring_lawful_intercept.pdf https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst9...
- aftbit 1y agoMost protocols that I use day-to-day are secure against simple passive interception. Either SSH or TLS encrypts just about every packet that leaves my network. This got much better with DNS over HTTPS (or TLS before that). Of course these protocols are sometimes susceptible to downgrade attacks, man in the middle compromises, etc, but none of that would be available to someone who was running a pcap without modifying the traffic streams. So how would a simple MD attack affect me? Any sort of CALEA attack on a higher protocol layer (e.g. compromising Gmail at Google instead of capturing their traffic) would make sense, but not a pcap.
- idiotsecant 1y agoIt turns out blowing a giant hole in your security model so that uncle sam can spy on your users also makes it easier for bad guys to spy on your users! Shocking!! China is the last group we should blame for this. Our government did this to us and must be held accountable or this will happen again, and again, and again.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gosub100 1y agoWhy is it suddenly a problem when it's a foreign government?
- fwip 1y agoExactly. China can't do much with my data, compared to the US government or my insurance company.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThey have skillfully used it for IP theft which OECD estimates is worth about $500B annually in lost revenue. Destroying the mechanism for R&D funding is actually a great strategy by China. Props
- shigawire 1y agoUnnecessary, this administration destroys R&D funding on its own.
- ForOldHack 1y agoThey do not know what R and D is, let alone what is does. One guy bankrupted a casino and saluted a North Korean General, and the other tried to impregnate a couch
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThe BBB actually has great tax rebates for R&D.
- christophilus 1y agoI’d prefer neither. But my prediction is that when we have a conflict with China, their digital access is going to be a game changer.
- impossiblefork 1y agoBusiness requires security. If you can do anything physical in the US, or in Europe etc. then you must be doing something so clever that secrecy is warranted.
- metalman 1y agoFor China a data set like this is only usefull if it can be validated, which it seems from reading between the lines, they have/are doing. The only use China has for this data set it to guage a competitors true capacity, VS there own capacity. It is highly likely that this data set will not be used to access any individuals information in any way that could lead to a situation that then could be back tracked, and that the copy that China has is hermeticaly sealed off in some inner sanctum of the secret squirles. Any posture that China takes will use many other sources of information beside this one. And of course, it's Chinas posture that has some strategists concerned right now, which is compounded by what looks like a perfect job, done completly online that has left a dead end trail, and zero proof of anything. So classic spy craft, with no possibility of a hollywood movie.
- baq 1y agohow is this not a total shitstorm on twitter and in media is beyond me. nobody cares since nobody got hurt?
- kogasa240p 1y agoAnd of course the only thing that the US government will do is double down on surveillance even harder.
- hereme888 1y agoOnce upon a time, problems like these were solved with definitive measures; cut the cable, or send a bullet. But state-sponsored cyber-war and other such aggressions are now considered normal daily life. Just as bad, U.S. MSM rarely reports American aggression towards others.
- oasisbob 1y agoI live in a state, Washington, with mandatory breach reporting and notifications. Haven't seen anything from this. Any idea why? Low compliance in general? Telcos think they're big enough to ignore state regs?
- mensetmanusman 1y agoChina pwned nearly every Chinese as well. The CCP can only kill American spies operating in China with this information.
- hungmung 1y agoChina has secret police operating in America right now.
- ForOldHack 1y agoThey have been here since before Nixon.
- loteck 1y agoAny discussion of Salt Typhoon should start with the unusual fact that it is still an active and uncontained incident, despite having been widely revealed in 2024. Typically we are accustomed to discussing lessons learned during a post mortem. This particular mortem has not yet posted. We are still owned and data continues to be compromised. https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/china_salt_typhoon_alert https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/china_salt_typhoon_al...
- ivape 1y agoI honestly don't believe China is doing something that America itself didn't start. The US did this too most likely.
- narrator 1y agoI think one unprecedented thing about how China operates is every single company is like a private military contractor with letters of marque and reprisal to do whatever the heck they feel like in the name of CCP world dominance. As long as it's patriotic, you can do absolutely whatever the heck you want to the other guys. Harvest their organs for profit, sabotage major infrastructure, hack absolutely everything, fund and supply and launder money for fentanyl production, etc. The kinds of things only the dirty tricks department of intelligence agencies are allowed to do in Western countries that they get called out and scandalized about when people find out about that. Likewise, if you're Jack Ma and they don't like what poem you quoted, all your stuff is now theirs and there aren't any silly laws to protect yourself. Absolutely 100% goal oriented to the steady increase in power of the communist party and absolutely no higher principles apply.
- jofla_net 1y agoRealpolitik
- __turbobrew__ 1y agoAnd yet my bank still only supports SMS 2fa, god help us all.
- Zigurd 1y agoI wrote the lawful intercept spec for a 3G GGSN node. So keep in mind that my knowledge of present day systems might be outdated. The spec was derived from pre-existing specifications for telephone equipment. One of the interesting things about lawful intercept is that it was supposed to hide from network management. Intercepts aren't logged at the network operator. The node being used in an intercept gives no indication that the intercept is happening. IIRC the standard at the time was to enable intercepting up to 3% of traffic, without the surveillance target of course knowing, but also without their carrier knowing. Law-enforcement agencies used LI consoles on their own premises to order intercepts. So it's not that lawful intercept was particularly easy to hack, it's that once it's compromised, detecting that it's being used nefariously is especially difficult. I would question whether anyone knows for sure when the compromise began, and how long it lasted.
- wildzzz 1y agoIt seems crazy to me that the network operator would have zero insight into any audit logs for lawful intercept. How would anyone know if someone broke in?
- Zigurd 1y agoI can only speculate as to what they were thinking when they wrote those specs. Evidently they didn't trust network operators, or they thought that they were avoiding potential attack surfaces. In addition to the privacy and policy and justice problems with LI, this exploit points to law enforcement agencies as the weak link. There are too many law-enforcement agencies that can initiate intercepts from systems that lack oversight and coordination.
- webdoodle 1y agoDitched my phone 5 years ago, guess I'm one of the few American's unaffected.
- alcide 1y agoWhat were your motivations? How has this impacted your daily life? I’m curious to know anything you are willing to share.
- webdoodle 1y ago> What were your motivations? I was tired of paying for a spy device that steals my attention and tries to psychologically condition me. > How has this impacted your daily life? I've found that many people are so addicted to there phone that they genuinely can't comprehend how to function without one. I'm lucky to have been around longer than smartphones, and remember how to do these things. For instance, going to someones house and knocking on there door instead of sending a text. Sure one is a little harder and takes more time, but shows you care enough to do it. Sending a text is so easy AI bots do it. I've had to seek out similar minded people. Most people just can't be bothered with someone who won't conform, so I seek out people who don't require me to have a phone to be my friend. I discovered quite quickly who was a good enough friend to come check on me, and also who I felt was important enough that'd I'd go too there house to see them. It may limit the size of my social circle, but I feel its a stronger relationship because of it. There are absolutely no drawbacks that I'm aware of.
- paulvnickerson 1y agoI just hope the NSA is better at this than they are.
- Ms-J 1y agoThis is what happens if you allow the government a backdoor into your messaging or communication systems. Open source software doesn't have backdoors and it works fine for everyone.
- Ms-J 1y agoRelated: https://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-the-nsa-2013-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-t... Israeli government has current access to United States communications the same way China does.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoIf an "FBI cyber cop" says "pwned" you know it's serious.
- almostbasic 1y agoIs anyone really surprised?
- phendrenad2 1y agoAnother day, another hack enabled by a Windows kernel zero-day. Why do critical telecom nodes run Windows? Why do critical telecom nodes with secret lawful intercept functionality running Windows? "Defeat by lowest bidder"?
- hulitu 1y ago> FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American' You have to love those people. What happened to FBI mandated backdoors ? Have they ceased to function ? Or were they used by the "enemy" because it was easier for them ? Blaming the others works so well, why bother.
- felishiagreen12 1y ago[dead]