Salt Typhoon telecom breach remarkable for its ‘indiscriminate’ targeting, FBI official says

Speaking at a conference presented by CyberScoop, Cynthia Kaiser said the impact of the breach could last forever.

One of the most notable elements of the monumental hack of major telecommunications companies is just how “indiscriminate” it was in its pursuit of data, a top FBI official said Wednesday.

The FBI has been investigating the breach, which it has blamed on Chinese government hackers commonly known as Salt Typhoon.

“What we found particularly remarkable in our investigation is the gigantic and seemingly indiscriminate collection of call records and data about American people, like your friends, your family, people in your community,” Cynthia Kaiser, deputy assistant director in the bureau’s cyber division, said at the 2025 Zero Trust Summit, presented by CyberScoop.

Kaiser characterized the breach as “a different level of insidiousness” from Beijing, one that reflects its “ambition and reckless aggression in cyberspace.”

The hack compromised a whole range of data, from law enforcement information to call records. And the scope of it left no kind of target out, not even children, Kaiser said. It’s data China will be able to hold on to forever, she said.

“Can any of you imagine a world in which China would have been stealing information about you as a 13-year-old?” she asked the audience. “That’s precisely what American children are facing in this new era of big data, cyber espionage, and that’s going to follow them no matter which careers or risks they choose in the future.”

The Salt Typhoon hack is one of a number of recent notable incidents that has prompted Trump administration officials and some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to say the United States needs to return fire at adversaries in cyberspace with its own offensive operations.

Salt Typhoon’s campaign remains active in and has hit multiple additional networks worldwide since being outed last year. The U.S. government sanctioned a Chinese national and a cybersecurity company based in Sichuan, China, for taking part in the hacking campaign.

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