Aaron Thomas

Encryption Backdoors Threaten All of Us

A recent cyberattack that just breached Verizon, AT&T, Lumen Technologies was tied to a sophisticated Chinese-government backed hacking group known as Salt Typhoon reported by The Wall Street Journal. The attack breached the systems built by the Internet Service Providers that give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to user data. These backdoors were made in compliance to the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA) which allowed U.S Law enforcement to commit “lawful intercepts”, wiretaps, and monitor internet traffic through the ISPs. The attackers abused the same backdoor that were used by these companies to cooperate with legal requests from authorities. These same backdoors which were used by U.S Law enforcement were breached by Chinese threat actors, allowing them to see all user internet traffic for months. This attack by Salt Typhoon could of been completely prevented if there were no backdoors into the ISP's stream of data.