FBI Declares Salt Typhoon Hack A National Defense Crisis

The Salt Typhoon hacking operation has become a “national defense crisis,” according to the FBI and its intelligence partners, who classify it as one of the biggest espionage operations in history.

According to officials, Chinese state-backed hackers have conducted attacks on telecommunications networks across 80 nations, resulting in data theft, communication surveillance, and attacks on military infrastructure.

“This is not just a cyber intrusion. This is the weaponization of our communications infrastructure,” a senior intelligence official said, as reported by Forbes.

Michael Machtinger, deputy assistant director for the FBI’s cyber division, added: “There’s a good chance this espionage campaign has stolen information from nearly every American,” reports The Register.

Investigators say that Salt Typhoon, active since at least 2019, infiltrated networks through unsecured vulnerabilities in Cisco, Palo Alto, and Ivanti equipment.

The hackers operated for multiple years by creating hidden accounts, enabling secret backdoors, and mirroring internet traffic. This allowed them to carry out their data theft operations. The Register says that victims included more than 200 American organizations, nine major telecom providers, and reportedly over 100 current and former U.S. presidential officials.

“This is one of the most consequential cyber espionage breaches that we’ve ever seen in the United States,” Machtinger warned The Register. He described Beijing’s use of proxy companies to support the spying as “really reckless and unbounded, in a way that is significantly outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space.”

A joint advisory released on August 27 by the FBI, NSA, CISA, the Department of Defense, and 12 allied nations provided technical guidance to help defenders detect and remove intruders. The officials advised organizations to isolate management networks, enforce stronger authentication, and eliminate weak credentials.

For individuals, experts recommend enabling multi-factor authentication, adding PIN protections to mobile accounts, and monitoring for suspicious activity.

Authorities say the scale of the Salt Typhoon makes clear that cyber defense is now inseparable from national defense. As one European intelligence official put it, according to Forbes: “This was not just an attack on the United States. This was an attack on global trust in our communications systems.”