At least two additional Trump family members were targeted, a person familiar with the matter said.

The attacks follow a previously reported deep intrusion into US telecommunications providers by a Chinese hacking group that has been dubbed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, which tracks cyberattacks that involve its software and services. Two people familiar with the earlier attempted Trump campaign hacks said the Salt Typhoon group had used that access to try to crack into the Trump phones.

That case had already alarmed the White House, which stood up a special response team to deal with it. The hackers got into as many as a dozen companies, The Washington Post has reported, including AT&T and Verizon. At some of the companies, including Verizon, they had essentially the same access as senior engineers, allowing them to mine account records and reroute customer traffic.

Officials said Salt Typhoon was connected to China’s powerful Ministry of State Security, the country’s main spy agency.

“Call record data is exactly the type of information the [People’s Republic of China] would want as part of an intelligence operation against major communications providers,” said Brandon Wales, who served until August as executive director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “Targeting campaigns, candidates and national leaders has been a consistent priority for China. Given the reported level of access to these companies, I assume there were many other targets that have not been made public.”

Though the Salt Typhoon intrusion has been a critical concern since August, the FBI issued its first statement confirming the attacks only Friday.

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“The US government is investigating the unauthorised access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China,” the agency said in a joint release with the cybersecurity agency. The statement said that after detecting the intrusions, the FBI and the agency “notified affected companies, rendered technical assistance, and rapidly shared information to assist other potential victims”.

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington said it was unaware of the attack and could not comment on it. “The presidential elections are the United States’ domestic affairs. China has no intention to and will not interfere in the US election. We hope that the US side will not make accusations,” spokesman Liu Pengyu said.

He warned against what he described as US efforts to “spread all kinds of disinformation about the so-called ‘Chinese hacking threats’.”

Unlike Russia and Iran, China had so far made no major detectable moves to support one presidential candidate or the other, US intelligence officials said this week. But operatives affiliated with the Chinese government had been involved in a handful of congressional contests, they said.

Washington Post

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