Excerpt:
"On January 26, 2026, The Telegraph disclosed that Chinese hackers had penetrated right into the heart of Downing Street, compromising mobile communications of senior officials across the Johnson, Truss, and Sunak administrations. The story was buried on page seven, treated as a technology curiosity. It was, in fact, a solvency event for the Western intelligence alliance. Not because phones were hacked, which happens, but because of how they were hacked: by weaponizing the very surveillance infrastructure that Western governments mandated for their own intelligence agencies. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in the United States and the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom require telecommunications carriers to build backdoors into their networks for court-ordered wiretapping. Chinese state hackers found those backdoors. And walked through them.
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On Cisco devices specifically, the attackers exploited the Guest Shell, a Linux container environment designed for running legitimate management scripts. By injecting malicious code into this trusted container, they achieved persistence that survived standard reboots and even operating system reimaging. The infection lived below the level that normal administrators could access. It was not hiding in the house. It had become part of the foundation.
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In the United States, nine telecommunications carriers have been confirmed compromised: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Lumen Technologies, Spectrum (Charter Communications), Consolidated Communications, Windstream, Viasat, and at least one additional unnamed provider. Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized it as the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history. "