[HN Gopher] AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon secur...
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AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment
reports
Author : redman25
Score : 255 points
Date : 2026-02-09 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| These companies were required by the government to have lawful
| intercept capability. A bad actor took advantage of that
| government-required backdoor, and now the government has the
| shamelessness to grandstand about privacy and security? We need
| to elect better people.
| dmix wrote:
| Is this speculation or has that information come out already?
| medina wrote:
| https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/12/experts-agree-u-s-
| co...
|
| > "The Chinese government's espionage operation deeply
| penetrated networks of at least nine U.S. telecom companies,
| including AT&T and Verizon," said Sen. Cantwell. "They
| exploited the wiretapping system that our law enforcement
| agencies rely on under the Communications Assistance for Law
| Enforcement Act -- known as CALEA. These systems became an
| open door for Chinese intelligence. Salt Typhoon allowed the
| Chinese operation to track millions of Americans' locations
| in real time, record phone calls at will and read our text
| messages."
| dmix wrote:
| That definitely deserves a congressional investigation
| then. No wonder they don't want to talk about that.
| xnx wrote:
| This quote speaks in past tense, but last I heard the
| Chinese still had access/control of compromised systems. Do
| we know if this attack is even over?
| gruez wrote:
| >and now the government has the shamelessness to grandstand
| about privacy and security? We need to elect better people.
|
| Where's "the government [... grandstanding] about privacy and
| security"? It's getting blocked by the companies, not the
| government.
|
| >She said Mandiant refused to provide the requested network
| security assessments, apparently at the direction of AT&T and
| Verizon.
| observationist wrote:
| "US Senator says AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt
| Typhoon security assessment reports"
|
| A US senator is using it for political grandstanding. She is
| an ineffective twit with no power and no principles, no right
| under law to receive what she demanded, and she made sure to
| run to the press with it "see! look, I'm a principled,
| powerful senator holding those evil corporations feet to the
| fire!"
|
| The problem is that the vulnerability exploited by salt
| typhoon is a systemic flaw implemented at the demand of
| Cantwell and other of our legislative morons.
|
| You cannot have an "only the good guys" backdoor. That
| doesn't work. People are bad, and stupid, and fallible. You
| can't make policy or exceptions that depend on people being
| good, and smart, and infallible.
|
| She's using the inevitable consequence of a system she helped
| create for her own political benefit. She voted for the
| backdoor back in 94 against the strenuous and principled
| objections by people who actually know what they're talking
| about.
|
| Bobblehead talking points should not serve as the basis for
| technical policy and governance, but here we are.
| Spivak wrote:
| You can tell this whole thing will be a nothingburger on
| the government side because the only thing she can actually
| _do_ is pull in some CEOs to (not) answer questions and
| receive a congressional tsk tsk.
| plagiarist wrote:
| The country is such a dumpster fire. Fucking
| congressional hearings. The best case scenario is a
| little video clip that legislators can use to campaign
| with.
|
| Each election period they have to take a break from
| eroding citizens' rights catering to lobbyists. The video
| clips help them pretend they were doing something other
| than insider trading while in the seat.
| observationist wrote:
| It's not even a strongly worded letter, lol. Senators and
| congress people should have to wear shock collars, and on
| majority polling get hourly "feedback" from their
| constituency, and for senators, weekly national feedback.
|
| The convention of states project seems like it might be
| the only way out - there's a shot at implementing term
| limits, clearing up some of the money in politics issues,
| no risk of a runaway convention, etc, and we can bypass
| the people deliberately fouling up the system.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >You cannot have an "only the good guys" backdoor.
|
| So what? If I store a document in a private Google doc. I
| know that technically a Google employee could read it if
| they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and
| culture in place make it have a 0% of happening. It's
| possible to design proper access systems where random
| people are not able to come in and utilize that access.
| observationist wrote:
| So you think there's no Google employees with privileged
| access gooning on private images, stalking, selling
| access, disrupting individuals, etc?
|
| Schmidt notoriously had a backdoor, and I'd be far more
| shocked if executives did not have backdoor access and
| know all the workarounds and conditions in which they
| have unaccountable, admin visibility into any data they
| might want to access.
|
| These are human beings, not diligent, intrepid champions
| of moral clarity with pristine principles.
| happyopossum wrote:
| Google employees with access? Yes. Google employees
| without audited and multiple levels of approval? No. I
| can tell you there are not.
|
| Any Eng at Google can read the entire codebase for
| gdrive, if there were backdoors it would become public
| knowledge very quickly.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > It's possible to design proper access systems where
| random people are not able to come in and utilize that
| access.
|
| How quickly "Hacker" News forgets Snowden.
| wang_li wrote:
| >I know that technically a Google employee could read it
| if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and
| culture in place make it have a 0% of happening.
|
| We know it's non-zero as they have already had occasions
| when it has happened that Google employees used their
| access to stalk teenagers.
| charcircuit wrote:
| And such access kicked off an internal investigation and
| got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.
| wang_li wrote:
| >And such access kicked off an internal investigation and
| got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.
|
| The complaints of the victim's parents kicked off an
| internal investigation, months later. It's not like
| google found this and took care of it on their own. Also,
| it has happened before too.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google's internal privacy controls and monitoring are
| much stronger today than when that happened.
| jtbayly wrote:
| This is such a backwards take. You are ignoring that the
| system you cite as evidence that secure systems with
| backdoors can be designed and protected from random
| access has not been perfectly protected.
|
| And you say it's stronger now.
|
| Ok, so which country or neighbor is going to be the one
| to hack our national encryption system with a back door
| the first time? The second time? The third time? Before
| we manage to get it right (which we _never_ will), what
| damage will be done by the backdoor? Probably something
| like Salt Typhoon, which you also conveniently ignore as
| a counterfactual to your claim.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It not being perfectly protected is by design. Security
| comes with trade offs.
|
| >Before we manage to get it right (which we never will)
|
| Keep in mind that modern encryption isn't perfect either.
| You can just guess the key and then decrypt a message. In
| practice if you make the walls high enough (requiring a
| ton of guesses) than it can be good enough to keep things
| secure.
| oasisbob wrote:
| > The problem is that the vulnerability exploited by salt
| typhoon is a systemic flaw implemented at the demand of
| Cantwell and other of our legislative morons.
|
| Assuming you're talking about CALEA, I find it hard to
| blame Cantwell personally given that she first joined the
| House in 1993, and CALEA was passed in 1994. She wasn't in
| much of a position to "demand" anything against the
| headwinds of a bipartisan bill passed in both chambers by a
| voice vote.
| jtbayly wrote:
| The point remains that she's _pretending_ the problem is
| AT &T, when really it is the US government's demand for a
| backdoor.
|
| This should be trumpeted as an example of why we cannot
| mandate encryption backdoors in chat, unless we want
| _everybody_ to have access to every encrypted message we
| send.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I agree with you on electing better people, but this is largely
| a systematic problem with how government works:
|
| 1. Propose bill to solve a problem which is either minor or
| completely misunderstood by the person proposing the bill 2.
| Pass bill, don't solve original "problem," creates 15 new,
| actual problems 3. Run on fixing all the new problems they
| created (and some others that don't exist) 4. Repeat
| maltalex wrote:
| The problem isn't the back door. Every telecom company in every
| country provides access for "lawful intercept". Phone taps have
| been a thing for decades and as far as I know, require a
| warrant.
|
| The problem is that telecoms are very large, very complex
| environments, often with poor security controls. Investing in
| better controls is hard, time-consuming and expensive, and many
| telecoms are reluctant to do it. That's not great great since
| telcos are prime targets for nation state hackers as Salt
| Typhoon shows.
|
| Hacking the lawful intercept systems is very brazen, but even
| if the hackers didn't don't go as far, and "only" gained
| control of normal telco stuff like call routing, numbering,
| billing, etc. it still would have been incredibly dangerous.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| The problem is the back door.
|
| Decentralized systems don't have the same faults.
|
| Just because you want to force a structure or paradigm
| doesn't absolve it of responsibility for the problem.
|
| Hand waving the problem away because a company is bad at
| management or scale doesn't change anything.
| maltalex wrote:
| Even if the back door wasn't there, you wouldn't want
| nation state hackers anywhere near telecoms since they're
| critical infrastructure. Telecoms should be highly secure.
| Period.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| It's okay to have unlocked backdoors because you don't
| lock your front door?
| Clent wrote:
| No, it's pointless to complain about the existence of a
| backdoor, locked or unlocked because there is a front
| door that is not being locked.
| maltalex wrote:
| I get that you don't like lawful intercept. That's fine.
| But focusing on only that aspect of telcos derails the
| conversation and prevents us (in the very broad sense of
| "us") from making progress on things we all agree on. Can
| we stop bikeshedding and agree that telcos are critical
| infrastructure and need to be highly secure in general?
|
| A hacker in control of a telco can do as they please
| regardless of any backdoors or lawful intercept systems.
| They can just use regular network functions to route
| calls wherever they want.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| you are both confusing two issues.
|
| Yes there is a lawful intercept system that operates inside
| telecoms networks, that is _an_ issue.
|
| The other issue is that there is no real security inside
| said telecoms networks. (side note, there is still fucking
| SS7 floating about)
|
| Salt typhoon is not "just hijacking lawful intercept" its
| ability to fuck with the network in a way that is largely
| undetected. Sure the intercept stuff might help, but they
| don't actually need that. In the same way we learnt about
| state actors taking complete control of middle east
| telecoms systems, we can be fairly sure that other state
| actors have taken control of USA telecoms systems
|
| Both the Executive and congress have done shit all about
| it, and will continue to ignore it until something happens
| pigggg wrote:
| This. The lawful intercept infrastructure is one facet of
| their network. The rest of their infra is also a deep
| concern: call records, SS7 signaling, the IP network,
| mobile infra and it's back end (sim swapping).
| maltalex wrote:
| > you are both confusing two issues.
|
| How am I confusing the two? My whole point was the same
| as yours - that the existence of lawful intercept is a
| separate issue and that the focus should be on securing
| telecoms.
| forgotaccount3 wrote:
| > many telecoms are reluctant to do it.
|
| This really buries the lede. Telecoms are reluctant to do it
| because 'doing' it isn't aligned with their priorities.
|
| Why would a telecom risk bankruptcy by investing heavily into
| a system that their competitors aren't?
|
| If you want a back-door to exist (questionable) then the
| government either needs to have strong regulatory compliance
| where poor implementations receive a heavy fine such that
| telecoms who don't invest into a secure implementation get
| fined in excess of the investment cost or the government
| needs to fund the implementation itself.
| maltalex wrote:
| Yes, telecoms should be forced to invest in their own
| security if they're not doing it. But the focus on the back
| door misses the point in my opinion. Even if the back door
| wasn't there, you wouldn't want nation state hackers
| anywhere near telecoms since they're critical
| infrastructure.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Even if the back door wasn't there, you wouldn't want
| nation state hackers anywhere near telecoms since they're
| critical infrastructure.
|
| This is only because of the design defect that "lawful
| intercept" requires.
|
| Telecoms should be _completely untrusted_ because
| everything is end-to-end encrypted. Compromising a
| telecom shouldn 't allow you to do anything other than
| bring about a denial of service, and even that would only
| be effective against anyone who didn't have a redundant
| link with a different provider, which all actually
| critical infrastructure should. And a denial of service
| is conspicuous, as opposed to spying on required-to-be-
| unencrypted traffic which can continue undetected
| indefinitely and is a significant national security risk.
|
| Our need to not be spied on is greater than our need to
| spy on ourselves and requiring designs that assume the
| opposite of that is a major self-imposed security
| vulnerability.
| illithid0 wrote:
| I've worked as a security consultant with one or two companies
| (who shall remain nameless) whose sole product was a hardware
| device with a black-box software stack meant to be a plug-and-
| play lawful intercept compliance solution. Telecoms should be
| able to buy it, install it, and access a web panel to do their
| government-mandated business.
|
| In the three or four year I worked with them, they would only
| let me do penetration testing of their user network, and never
| the segments where the developers were, and never the product
| itself. In speaking with their security team (one guy -
| shocker) during compliance initiatives, it was very clear to me
| that the product itself was not to be touched per the
| _explicit_ direction of senior leadership.
|
| All I can say is that if the parts of their environment they
| _did_ let us touch are any indication of the state of the rest
| of their assets, that device was compromised a long time ago.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| when I lived in NoVA I had a roommate that installed and
| serviced boxes that sound suspiciously similar.
|
| SSL crackers to MITM all ISP user traffic
| downrightmike wrote:
| Not even that, they have CVE 10 from 2019 on their routers,
| which the hackers got root on then patched, so they wouldn't be
| kicked off by other hackers. All because IT upkeep wasn't done
| and hardening on Cisco devices is a distinct admin guide and
| not at all on by default. The days are long gone of qualified
| and careful network admins, now we just get the low-ball
| outsourced Cisco TAC and the like which DGAF
| ok123456 wrote:
| If they simply implicated an "APT" in wrongdoing, they would have
| released it, as it would have been unremarkable and fit neatly
| within the Overton window of hissing-chinese spys justifying an
| even more expansive national security apparatus and general anti-
| sino sentiments among the ruling class in Washington.
|
| This leads me to two possible, non-exclusive outcomes: the links
| to China are tenuous, and the attribution is flimsy (e.g., they
| accessed a machine at 9 am Beijing time!); or the report
| implicates the system itself as unauditable by design, which was
| bound to happen given the design of the intercept tools.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| These reports would be useful for any other attacker interested
| in their infra, it's obvious why the companies wouldn't want to
| release them in this manner.
| thinkthatover wrote:
| If they can't provide it to us for national security
| purposes, certainly they could to the appropriate
| congressional subcommittee
| ok123456 wrote:
| Yes, most organizations are shy to release reports that make
| them look incompetent or highlight systemic problems. That's
| why we have laws that now require disclosure of incidents
| that may have exposed customer data.
| JasonADrury wrote:
| >That's why we have laws that now require disclosure of
| incidents that may have exposed customer data.
|
| I don't think there's any jurisdiction that requires public
| disclosure at this level of detail. It's really an
| extraordinary ask. How many of these reports have you seen?
| natas wrote:
| why does the government, any government, has a backdoor on
| anyone's phones to begin with?
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Terrorists, drugs, the children, future excuse for the
| panopticon.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Wiretapping predates all of these sort of arguments.
| Wiretapping was invented at basically the same time that
| telephones themselves were and was underway for decades
| before the law even began to take note; the first major legal
| development in this regard was the Supreme Court saying cops
| could do it without a warrant in 1928 (they already had been
| the entire time.)
| pluralmonad wrote:
| While that is interesting from a historical perspective,
| does it inform on the myriad of excuses trotted out for
| these abuses today?
| jbug187 wrote:
| srsly doubt that these reports would ever be released publicly,
| but i'm curious if they might suggest that their recent high-
| profile extended outages are related to weaknesses that were
| easily exploited by bad actors.
| engelo_b wrote:
| blocking these reports is a huge blow to systemic risk
| management.
|
| if the specific vectors of the breach aren't disclosed, the rest
| of the critical infrastructure ecosystem is basically flying
| blind. it feels like we're trading collective security for
| corporate reputational damage control.
| farco12 wrote:
| This interview discusses potential vectors:
| https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/tmobile-salt-typhoon-...
| Zigurd wrote:
| Many years ago I wrote a functional spec for lawful intercept in
| a 3G data node. It was based on a spec for a different product,
| so it contained a lot of institutional knowledge of how lawful
| intercept works.
|
| A key element of the design of lawful intercept is not to trust
| the company running the network. Otherwise employees of that
| company would become targets for organized crime influence, among
| what are probably a few other considerations. The network
| operator isn't told about intercepts, and the relatively low rate
| of traffic intercept, the node has to support up to 3% of traffic
| intercepted, at least that was the spec at the time, makes it
| relatively easy for that traffic to be hidden from network
| management tools. It's not supposed to show up in your logs or
| network management reporting.
|
| Intercepts originate on LI consoles operated by law enforcement
| agencies. This sounds pretty good so far. Until a hacker breaks
| into an LI console. Now that hacker can acquire traffic with
| pinpoint accuracy, undetected by design.
|
| I have always been skeptical of claims that network operators
| have eliminated salt typhoon from their networks. I do not
| believe they know when the exploit began. Nor can they tell if
| their networks are truly free of salt typhoon activity. There are
| multiple vendors of LI console software. It's a standardized
| interoperable protocol to set up intercepts. So there's no one
| neck to wring.
| jtbayly wrote:
| What is an LI console? Where is it installed that it has access
| to accomplish this?
| bastard_op wrote:
| They don't want their backdoors they allowed and buffoonery in
| securing/managing them exposed. This is only the wireless
| providers, now what about all the residential ISP's like Comcast,
| Cox, Charter, etc? They're even more incompetent usually, I've
| worked for enough to know.
| learingsci wrote:
| Glad no comments here are directed at China. We vilify our own
| government, our businesses, even ourselves for being too naive or
| gasp having trust in our networks. But the actual perpetrators,
| China, we have no harsh words for. It's like if Ukrainian
| citizens blamed themselves rather than Putin. That's how
| thoroughly brainwashed most people (here) are.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I have plenty of harsh words for China, but we know they and
| other countries are an ongoing threat so the criticism is why
| aren't we defending ourselves better?
| bigyabai wrote:
| I'll actually steelman against this; there's nothing to
| criticize them for. The US does the exact same thing and
| supports regimes around the world that perpetuate cyber-terror
| as a weapon of asymmetrical conflict. The US has to come to the
| table for negotiation or secure itself accordingly.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The sheer elegance of hacking a law enforcement intercept
| architecture that's designed to make intercept traffic hard
| to track would be so irresistibly satisfying to any hacker
| that I don't see how they could say "Nahhh, too far."
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| A decent example of why implementing authoritarian policies is a
| bad strategy for the US; particularly coming from the current
| administration. We're only strengthening Chinese supremacy at
| this point and tearing the US apart in the process of trying to
| claw some back. We don't have what it takes to pull this shit off
| as well as China does. This is a failure at many levels: the
| uncoordinated surveillance, the gross lack of security, lack of
| skills, lack of knowledge, etc. and it extends to many aspects of
| American governance. Between the US putting significant traumatic
| pressure on its own citizens and companies doing mass layoffs in
| an increasingly unaffordable economy, this will push even more
| brain drain overseas, which only accelerates China's
| strengthening stance more.
| MisterTea wrote:
| This very much feels like the old cold war dynamic between
| Russia and the USA with the roles reversed.
| briandw wrote:
| This was enabled by the Communications Assistance for Law
| Enforcement Act (CALEA), enacted in 1994. Congress made their
| bed, now they need to lie in. Time to remove the govt mandated
| backdoors.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| Infosec is such a scam
| Zenul_Abidin wrote:
| The hackers already have it.
|
| There is no reason to hide it from the general public.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I worked at Verizon almost 10 years ago, they hired a group come
| to come in and assess. Within 3-4 hours they pwned the entire
| place (including offices outside of the office we were in)
| through an unsecured windows jenkins machine/script console.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| translation: we got pwn3d, and badly
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