AT&T and Verizon confirmed Chinese hackers have targeted a small number of high-profile customers.
AT&T and Verizon were targeted by China-backed hacking group Salt Typhoon, but their networks are now secure, the telecommunications companies said on Saturday in their first acknowledgement of the hacking.
Meanwhile, Lumen Technologies, which owns CenturyLink, said on Sunday that it has no evidence of Chinese actors in its network.
It comes after the White House said on Friday that it had identified a ninth U.S. telecom network that had been compromised by the wide-ranging espionage campaign, which began 2022, and that they are still accessing the scope of the breach.
Officials didn’t provide a full list of the compromised networks. Earlier this month, the FBI said malware from Salt Typhoon and two other Beijing-backed hacking groups, dubbed by Microsoft as Flax Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, were still embedded in some U.S. systems.
Verizon said in a statement to The Epoch Times that it has notified “a small number of high-profile customers in government and politics” who were targeted by the hackers.
The company said it has contained the threat, and that “an independent and highly respected cyber security firm” had confirmed the containment.
“Immediately upon learning of this incident, Verizon took several key actions to protect its customers and its network including partnering with federal law enforcement and national security agencies, industry partners, and private cybersecurity firms,” Verizon’s Chief Legal Officer Vandana Venkatesh said in a statement.
“We have not detected threat actor activity in Verizon’s network for some time, and after considerable work addressing this incident, we can report that Verizon has contained the activities associated with this particular incident.”
On Saturday, an AT&T spokesperson told Reuters the company detected “no activity by nation-state actors in our networks at this time.”
“Based on our current investigation of this attack, the People’s Republic of China targeted a small number of individuals of foreign intelligence interest,” the spokesperson said.
By Lily Zhou
