A recent Chinese cyber-espionage attack inside the nation’s major telecom networks that may have reached as high as the communications of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance was designated this week by one U.S. senator as “far and away the most serious telecom hack in our history.”
The U.S. has yet to figure out the full scope of what China accomplished, and whether or not its spies are still inside U.S. communication networks.
“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the New York Times on Thursday.
The revelations highlight the rising cyberthreats tied to geopolitics and nation-state actor rivals of the U.S., but inside the federal government, there’s disagreement on how to fight back, with some advocates calling for the creation of an independent federal U.S. Cyber Force. In September, the Department of Defense formally appealed to Congress, urging lawmakers to reject that approach.
Among one of the …