China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the administration of President Joe Biden has described, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.
"The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chair, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview Thursday.
Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.
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