White House says 9th telecoms company has been hacked as part of Chinese espionage campaign

The Biden administration said earlier this month that at least eight telecommunications companies and dozens of nations had been impacted by the Chinese hacking operation known as Salt Typhoon.

On Friday, deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger told reporters that a ninth victim had been identified after the administration released guidance to companies about how to locate Chinese hackers in their networks.

The hackers compromised the networks of telecommunications companies to gather customer call records and access the private communications of a limited number of people, officials said.

Neuberger said officials did not yet have a precise sense of how many Americans overall were targeted by Salt Typhoon, in part because the hackers were careful about their methods, but she said that a "large number" of the victims were in Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

Officials said they believe the hackers wanted to identify who owned the devices and spy on their texts and phone calls if they were "government targets of interest," Neuberger said.

Most of the victims are "primarily involved in government or political activity," the FBI said.

She also said, without offering details, that the government was planning further action in the coming weeks in response to the hacking campaign, though she did not say what they were.

"We know that voluntary cybersecurity practices are inadequate to protect against China, Russia and Iran hacking of our critical infrastructure," she said.