‘They’re still there, and we have yet to figure out a way to kick them off,’ he said.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told attendees of the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum on May 3 that the Chinese communist regime still has access to the nine U.S. telecommunication companies hacked into in December 2024 during the Salt Typhoon cyber intrusion coordinated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
“They did it in such a way that it was very hard for us to detect that they were there and not done through the typical way that you would do something with malware,” he explained to the panel moderator.
“It was done through access to routers and using a lot of sophisticated techniques, and it was the, as you mentioned, the Chinese Ministry of State Security that coordinated this operation. They’re still there, and we have yet to figure out a way to kick them off.”
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identified the hacks in October of 2024 and began an investigation.
In a joint statement issued on Nov. 13, 2024, the agencies revealed that the hackers compromised the networks of multiple telecom companies and stole customer call records and private communications from “a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity.”
CISA Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Jeff Greene said on Dec. 3 that he didn’t have a timeline on when Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-backed hackers could be purged from U.S. telecom networks.
“It would be impossible for us to predict when we’ll have full eviction,” Greene said at the time.
On Dec. 4, 2024, the Biden administration revealed that at least eight U.S. telecommunication companies had been compromised by the Chinese state-sponsored hackers, with the threat group Salt Typhoon believed to have hacked into communications of senior U.S. government officials.
By Dec. 27, the number of compromised telecommunication companies had increased to nine.
Kelly sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and told the audience that rebuilding the United States’ telecom infrastructure in order to prevent hackers from gaining access continues to be a topic of conversation among his fellow committee members.
By T.J. Muscaro
