T-Mobile ‘chopped a cable’ to expel Chinese hackers from its network

New reporting from Bloomberg revealed how cybersecurity staff at U.S. phone provider T-Mobile identified and expelled Chinese hackers from its network in 2024 during a spate of industry-wide intrusions by Beijing aimed at stealing customer data.

The hacks were carried out by a Chinese government-backed hacking group called Salt Typhoon . The campaign compromised hundreds of phone companies, internet giants, and datacenter providers with the goal of collecting phone records and information about senior U.S. government officials, including then-presidential candidates. Hacked companies included AT&T, Verizon , satellite phone network Viasat , and network infrastructure giants Charter and Windstream .

By and large, T-Mobile escaped a widescale breach of its network by catching the activity early — and resorted to physically cutting the cable to a compromised system, per Bloomberg.

The publication said T-Mobile’s cyber staff spent months looking for suspected hackers in its network without success. Eventually, the company found unusual behavior on one of its systems coming from another router belonging to a different telecom company, which T-Mobile did not name.

After identifying the breach, T-Mobile’s cybersecurity chief Jeff Simon told Bloomberg that he and three others drove to the nearby Bellevue, Washington, data center, found the compromised system, pulled out a set of scissors and snipped the cable connecting the box to the outside world.

We’ve reached out to T-Mobile for more information, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.

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