An alarming new hack by China has penetrated the nerve center of the United States: its telephone network.David E. Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, discusses what the scope of the attack tells us about China’s growing power.Guest: David E. Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said hackers listened to phone calls and read texts by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks that connect systems.Emerging details of Chinese hack have left U.S. officials increasingly concerned.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. An alarming new hack by China has penetrated the nerve center of the United States, our phone network. Today, my colleague David Sanger on what the scope of this new attack tells us about the growing power of one of America's biggest adversaries. It's Thursday, December 12th. David Sanger, you're back.
I am, and delighted to be here.
So, David, you are here today to talk about a hack. And close listeners of the show will know that this is a topic you do sometimes talk about on The Daily. We counted. You have done three shows on hacking in recent years. But this particular hack, this one you're looking into right now, this one is different, you say.
It is, Sabrina. It's the big one. It's from China. It was run by the Chinese Ministry of State Security and hackers working for them. It's got a strange name. It's called Salt Typhoon. But the key thing to know here is that this is a hack of America's telecommunication systems. It's a hack of AT&T and Verizon. It's a hack of all of the smaller communication systems.
And what's remarkable about it is that the Chinese were able by spending millions of dollars and a lot of time to figure out how to get into the core of what binds the United States together, which gives them access to so much more. What's really striking to me is the degree to which this has freaked out American officials.
The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner, who was himself a telecoms executive in a previous life, told me it is the worst intrusion into the United States he has ever seen in his career. Wow. Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, organized in the Situation Room a meeting with the chief executive officers of each of the major telecommunications companies.
They dragged them to Washington and said, we are going to have to figure out an emergency way to get the Chinese out of your systems and to rebuild those systems so they can't get back in. So the critical question that this hack raises is how could it be this late in the cyber wars, which have been going on for two decades, that China has managed once again to pierce America's defenses? Okay.
So this hack really shook Washington, and also it shook a number of important American companies, these telecoms, as you're saying. Tell me, David, what we know about it.
So the first thing we know is that telecom companies were clueless for a year, maybe two years, that the Chinese were in their system. In other words, they had their radars off. In fact, for some parts of their systems, they never had radars on at all. And the second thing is that Microsoft researchers put the telecom companies onto this for the first time.
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