US government has been hacking Chinese mobile operator networks to intercept millions of text messages, as well as the operator of region’s fibre optic cable network, South China Morning Post writes citing Edward Snowden.
More information on National Security Agency activity in China
and Hong Kong has been revealed by SCMP on Sunday, shedding light
on statements Snowden made in an interview on June 12.
“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone
companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden was quoted
as saying on the SCMP's website.
In a series of reports the paper claims Snowden has provided
proof of extensive US hacking activity in the region.
The former CIA technician and NSA contractor reportedly
provided to the paper the documents detailing specific attacks on
computers over a four-year period, including internet protocol
(IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still
being monitored remotely. SCMP however did not reveal any
supporting documents.
The US government has been accused of a security breach at the
Hong Kong headquarters of the operator of the largest regional
fibre optic cable network operator, Pacnet. Back in 2009, the
company’s computers were hacked by the NSA but since then the
operation has been shut down, according to the documents the
paper claims to have seen.
Pacnet’s network spans across Hong Kong, China, Korea, Japan,
Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore and provides connections to
16 data centers for telecom companies, corporations and
governments across the region.
The whistleblower has also allegedly revealed the US had viewed
millions of text messages by hacking Chinese mobile phone
companies. That is a significant claim since the Chinese sent
almost billion text messages in 2012 and China Mobile is the
world’s largest mobile network carrier.
In his very first leak to the media, Snowden had already exposed
the scale of the American government spying operation on its
domestic mobile network operators. He later revealed that the US
and the UK possessed technology to access the Blackberry phones
of delegates at two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009.
In a third article, SCMP claims that the US on a regular basis
has been attacking the servers at Tsinghua University, one of
country’s biggest research institutions. The whistleblower said
that information obtained pointed to hacking activities, because
it contained such details as external and internal IP addresses
in the University’s network, which could only have been retrieved
by a security breach.
Tsinghua University is host to one of Chinas’ six major backbone
networks, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET)
containing data about millions of Chinese citizens.