On October 25 2024, the FBI and CISA released a joint statement marking the first public acknowledgement that US telecommunications networks had been breached by Salt Typhoon, a group widely recognized to have credible links to the Chinese government.
As the months went by, numerous companies revealed they had been targeted, including AT&T and Verizon, which confirmed threat actors had successfully penetrated their systems, with the attackers likely accessing the network traffic of millions of Americans, as well as high-profile government individuals and a backdoor surveillance network used by the US authorities.