BREAKING: AP sources: Chinese hackers targeted cellphones used by Trump, Vance https://t.co/2gI7BYskmm
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 25, 2024
The hacking service that the Israelis sell publicly allows you to hack someone’s phone by simply getting them to click a link. It’s not hard for any state to do this.
But I thought Iran was the one hacking Trump?
Chinese government-linked hackers are believed to have targeted phones used by Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as part of a larger breach of US telecommunications networks, according to a New York Times report.The Trump campaign was informed this week that the phone numbers of the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominee were among those targeted during a breach of the Verizon network, the paper said, citing sources.
Investigators are working to determine what data, if any, was accessed by the “sophisticated” hack, the sources said. Other current and former government officials were also targeted, according to the report.
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed an investigation was under way into the “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China”. It did not name the Trump campaign in the statement.
…
In a statement, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, criticized the White House and Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, and sought to blame them for allowing a foreign adversary to target the campaign, the Times reported.
Hacking attribution is always retarded, even if you can prove something was hacked.
The Times is not proving anyone was hacked, but they’re going ahead and doing attribution. I get that they are just publishing a press release from the government as they always do (the AP is reporting the same thing), but the same is true of the government. No one can accurately attribute a hack.
This was all in CIA WikiLeaks documents many years ago: when you use a hack on the internet, other people can steal the hack itself and use it themselves against other targets. So anyone involved in this has all of the CIA’s hacks and the Israeli ones. The documents also admitted that there was no way to know who was using what software.
That said, presumably every big country is hacking every other country all the time.
