HN Reader

The security community warned that making Lawful Access easy and automated would guarantee that bad people would penetrate the network.

And now we have China using CALEA-crippled systems to slurp up the entire USA network. Exactly as predicted.

And this - "outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space" - LOL. ROTFL even. The NSA tapped Google's backbone! Have we forgotten Room 641A? MAINWAY? Poindexter and TIA? Palantir?

The NSA used to play defence and offence, and has gone full-offence for a generation. Did anyone really believe that only the USA could play offence?

Morons.

This is what we get for installing mandatory government backdoors all over our communications infrastructure. Unbelievable that such a critical piece of infrastructure wasn't secured properly. But after the OPM hack and the bungled implementation of CIA "drop sites" online, nothing about our government's cyber incompetence surprises me anymore.

I wrote the lawful intercept spec for a 3G GGSN node. So keep in mind that my knowledge of present day systems might be outdated. The spec was derived from pre-existing specifications for telephone equipment. One of the interesting things about lawful intercept is that it was supposed to hide from network management. Intercepts aren't logged at the network operator. The node being used in an intercept gives no indication that the intercept is happening.

IIRC the standard at the time was to enable intercepting up to 3% of traffic, without the surveillance target of course knowing, but also without their carrier knowing. Law-enforcement agencies used LI consoles on their own premises to order intercepts.

So it's not that lawful intercept was particularly easy to hack, it's that once it's compromised, detecting that it's being used nefariously is especially difficult. I would question whether anyone knows for sure when the compromise began, and how long it lasted.

The CISA announcement, which contains a lot more substance, was posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065458

Any discussion of Salt Typhoon should start with the unusual fact that it is still an active and uncontained incident, despite having been widely revealed in 2024. Typically we are accustomed to discussing lessons learned during a post mortem. This particular mortem has not yet posted. We are still owned and data continues to be compromised.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/china_salt_typhoon_al...

Salt Typhoon used govt-mandated backdoors to spy on Americans. As a result the govt told Americans to use Signal rather than rely on the phone system.

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/17/nx-s1-5223490/text-messaging-...

> What this really underscores is that what the PRC is doing through these proxy actors is really reckless and unbounded, in a way that is significantly outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space,"

What norms are he referring to?

do we have other sources for this other than just this government’s?

i absolutely believe it may have happened, but due to overwhelming and well documented history of lies from this regime, i’d feel like i was standing on more solid footing with this if we had some reputable 3rd party sources. ideally someone who is far away from the hysterical levels of partisanship our current leaders have planted themselves.

again, i’m not in denial that it couldnt have happened, it’s just that unfortunately i think it would be unreasonable to trust anything from this regime’s people. and to reiterate, they have a long and very well documented history of outright lying. not even typical politician half truths, but shoving it in our face lying.

And of course the only thing that the US government will do is double down on surveillance even harder.

Related: https://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-t...

Israeli government has current access to United States communications the same way China does.

> This indiscriminate targeting, as the FBI and White House security officials have previously noted, allowed Beijing’s snoops to geo-locate millions of mobile phone users, monitor their internet traffic, and, in some cases, record their phone calls. Victims reportedly included President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Welp... that's quite a capable piece of surveillance.

I imagined it involved tapping to cell towers/cell infrastructure, but the details at the wikipedia page [1] suggest servers were hacked instead? Did they hack AT&T servers or something?

Side note, are there any ways to not get your data stolen in such cases? I would imagine using only a VPN might help, but if they're getting data from triangulation you couldn't do much short of turning off your phone, right?

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon#Methodology

It turns out blowing a giant hole in your security model so that uncle sam can spy on your users also makes it easier for bad guys to spy on your users! Shocking!!

China is the last group we should blame for this. Our government did this to us and must be held accountable or this will happen again, and again, and again.

Meanwhile in Europe, dump politics do nothing to stop USA and PRC spy.

The ban for anti-social networks to less 16yo is a good start but it does not fix the smartphone or telecommunication spy.

The need to ban twitter, tiktok, facebook and many others is a must.

Presumably this includes SMS-based MFA codes.

I live in a state, Washington, with mandatory breach reporting and notifications.

Haven't seen anything from this. Any idea why? Low compliance in general? Telcos think they're big enough to ignore state regs?

This is what happens if you allow the government a backdoor into your messaging or communication systems.

Open source software doesn't have backdoors and it works fine for everyone.

> FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

You have to love those people. What happened to FBI mandated backdoors ? Have they ceased to function ? Or were they used by the "enemy" because it was easier for them ? Blaming the others works so well, why bother.

China pwned nearly every Chinese as well. The CCP can only kill American spies operating in China with this information.

If an "FBI cyber cop" says "pwned" you know it's serious.

Once upon a time, problems like these were solved with definitive measures; cut the cable, or send a bullet.

But state-sponsored cyber-war and other such aggressions are now considered normal daily life. Just as bad, U.S. MSM rarely reports American aggression towards others.

For China a data set like this is only usefull if it can be validated, which it seems from reading between the lines, they have/are doing. The only use China has for this data set it to guage a competitors true capacity, VS there own capacity. It is highly likely that this data set will not be used to access any individuals information in any way that could lead to a situation that then could be back tracked, and that the copy that China has is hermeticaly sealed off in some inner sanctum of the secret squirles. Any posture that China takes will use many other sources of information beside this one. And of course, it's Chinas posture that has some strategists concerned right now, which is compounded by what looks like a perfect job, done completly online that has left a dead end trail, and zero proof of anything. So classic spy craft, with no possibility of a hollywood movie.

Ditched my phone 5 years ago, guess I'm one of the few American's unaffected.

I think one unprecedented thing about how China operates is every single company is like a private military contractor with letters of marque and reprisal to do whatever the heck they feel like in the name of CCP world dominance. As long as it's patriotic, you can do absolutely whatever the heck you want to the other guys. Harvest their organs for profit, sabotage major infrastructure, hack absolutely everything, fund and supply and launder money for fentanyl production, etc. The kinds of things only the dirty tricks department of intelligence agencies are allowed to do in Western countries that they get called out and scandalized about when people find out about that.

Likewise, if you're Jack Ma and they don't like what poem you quoted, all your stuff is now theirs and there aren't any silly laws to protect yourself. Absolutely 100% goal oriented to the steady increase in power of the communist party and absolutely no higher principles apply.

Why is it suddenly a problem when it's a foreign government?

I just hope the NSA is better at this than they are.

Is anyone really surprised?

Another day, another hack enabled by a Windows kernel zero-day. Why do critical telecom nodes run Windows? Why do critical telecom nodes with secret lawful intercept functionality running Windows? "Defeat by lowest bidder"?

how is this not a total shitstorm on twitter and in media is beyond me. nobody cares since nobody got hurt?

And yet my bank still only supports SMS 2fa, god help us all.

A better title would be “Chinese Communist Party” or “China” pwned nearly every American… This is a state, not a school computer club.

Oh goodie

I honestly don't believe China is doing something that America itself didn't start. The US did this too most likely.