‘There’s no accountability’: Senators berate cybersecurity officials for response to ‘disturbing and widespread’ Chinese hack of US telecoms

None of the at least eight breached U.S. telecommunications providers have managed to oust the hackers from their networks.

By Matthew Xiao, The Washington Free Beacon

Senators berated the Biden administration’s cybersecurity officials for their weak response and lack of accountability following a massive Chinese government-linked hack of U.S. and global telecommunications networks, Politico reported.

“There’s no accountability in anybody sitting up there. They have not told us why they didn’t catch it, what they’ve done to prevent it,” Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.) said after a classified briefing Wednesday by the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

First announced in November, the breach by Salt Typhoon, a group operated by the Chinese Communist Party, “involved the infiltration of dozens of telecommunications companies, the hack of phones belonging to officials including President-elect Donald Trump and potential eavesdropping on the phone calls of large swaths of the U.S. population,” according to Politico.

None of the at least eight breached U.S. telecommunications providers have managed to oust the hackers from their networks, according to Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.

“If somebody came to my office and said, ‘Hey look, something bad happened, don’t worry, I’m responsible for it, but I’m not going to be responsible for it, and I don’t have any plan to fix it,’ what would you do? You’d fire them,” Scott said.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said the extent of the breach was “breathtaking” and pushed officials to declassify more information.

“I think the American people need to know the extent of the breach here. I think they will be shocked at the extent of it,” Hawley said. “I think they need to know about their text messages, their voicemail, their phone calls. It’s very bad, it’s very, very bad, and it is ongoing.”

“It’s the most disturbing and widespread incursion into our telecommunications systems in the history of the world, not just the country, because of how massive our telecommunications system is,” Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner (D., Va.), a former telecommunications executive, slammed the companies for allowing “gaping holes” in the security of critical systems.

“I think there is huge concern, far and away the worst telecom hack, and the fact is that they are still in the systems,” Warner said after the briefing.

Warner and other lawmakers have started pushing for legislation to secure the U.S. telecommunications network before the end of the year, according to the Washington Examiner.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R., S.D.), who will run the Senate Armed Services Committee’s cyber subcommittee in the next Congress, noted that there should be regulations for these companies.

“The question is what’s the appropriate way to put them into play that [telecom companies] can actually adhere to them,” Rounds said. “That legislation, I believe, will be coming.”

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