Security chief talks to El Reg as Feds urge everyone to use encrypted chat
While Chinese-government-backed spies maintained access to US telecommunications providers' networks for months – and in some cases still haven't been booted out – T-Mobile US thwarted successful attacks on its systems"within a single-digit number of days," according to the carrier's security boss Jeff Simon.Wednesday, declined to make public the exact timeline of the intrusion attempts by the Beijing-run crew.
"We see ourselves as a bit of an outlier here versus what's been reported about the other telecoms," Simon toldT-Mobile US began hunting for Salt Typhoon in early summer, upon hearing reports from law enforcement and other operators about a"large, coordinated attack on telecommunications infrastructure," Simon recalled.
We understand miscreants managed to get into some edge network infrastructure devices including a T-Mo-operated router, but got no further as they were stopped there; as above, theyWe cannot say with certainty that the adversary has been evicted, because we still don't know the scope of what they're doing
Simon declined to say how many of the carrier's devices were accessed, only that"it is less than one percent of our telecommunications infrastructure." This includes implementing FIDO2 authentication for all T-Mo employees –"and it makes credential theft from our workforce extremely difficult," Simon noted.
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