Governments, telcos ward off China's hacking Typhoons

While the US government and at least eight telecommunications firms struggle to defend their networks against the China-sponsored Salt Typhoon group, other nations' telecommunications firms have often been primary targets for advanced persistent threats (APTs) as well.

In 2023, China-linked group Earth Estries — which may overlap with Salt Typhoon — compromised telecommunications firms in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions, as well as the US. In 2022, a Chinese APT group alternatively known as Daggerfly and Evasive Panda infected systems at a telecommunications organization in Africa, installing a backdoor tool known as MgBot. And earlier this year, Chinese APT group Volt Typhoon targeted Singapore's largest telco, Singtel, with attacks, although the company denies any of the probes were successful.

China has made infiltrating other nations' networks a foundation of its geopolitical strategy, and other countries — and their citizens — should consider their networks no longer private, says David Wiseman, vice president of secure communications for cybersecurity firm BlackBerry.

"All countries need to assume they are affected," he says. "The impact [of these attacks are] operational in that the government can no longer be confident using traditional phone calls and SMS. This is accelerating the usage of 'over the top' encrypted communications applications for official government communications."

Over-the-top (OTT) applications and services are those that are delivered over the Internet, not through traditional telecommunications systems.

US telecommunications firms — including Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile — are struggling to clean their networks and prevent two Chinese groups, Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, from persisting in their systems. Earlier this year, Salt Typhoon gained access to some of the telecom systems used to satisfy wiretap requests, while Volt Typhoon has compromised telecommunications and other critical infrastructure to pre-position ahead of possible region conflict.

Telecommunications infrastructure is one of the most attractive targets for nation-state actors, because they affect all facets of a country's economy and provide in-depth data on its citizens, says Chris Henderson, senior director of threat operations at Huntress, a threat-intelligence firm.

"As telecommunication companies have grown from managing landline infrastructure to being one of the most data-rich organizations, their attractiveness to both for-profit groups and state-sponsored espionage has also grown," he says, adding that they "know more about you than arguably any other organization — they understand where you have been physically located, who you are speaking with, and for how long."

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