The Federal Communications Commission approved new regulations Wednesday designed to crack down on robocalling, protect telecommunications networks from cyberattacks and further vet equipment-testing labs based overseas.

Commissioners unanimously passed a measure to strengthen telecom companies’ “Know Your Customer” requirements for verifying callers’ identities. Among the potential solutions being considered are requiring telecoms to verify a customer’s name, address, government ID and alternative phone numbers prior to enabling their service.

In a statement ahead of the vote, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that under current rules some telecoms “do the bare minimum” to verify callers and have “become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.”

“As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said.

Current rules require telecoms to take “affirmative, effective” measures to verify callers and block illegal calls, but in practice this system has largely relied on self-attestation from the companies. Because a single call can traverse multiple networks, carriers must also often rely on identity verification performed by other telecoms.

For example, the telecom that transmitted thousands of false robocalls imitating then-President Joe Biden during the 2024 New Hampshire presidential primary initially reported to the FCC that they had the highest level of confidence in the identity of those using the phone numbers. That turned out to be false, as the robocallers spoofed a well-known former state Democratic Party official.

Unsurprisingly, the commission is also interested in finding ways to better enforce Know Your Customer rules, including tying penalties to the number of illegal calls that were placed.

Since 1999, the FCC has traditionally granted blanket authorization for domestic carriers to operate interstate telecommunications services within U.S. borders. Another rule passed by the commission today would formally end that practice for foreign companies on the FCC’s covered entity list.  

The list bans a small number of foreign companies based in Russia or China from selling their equipment in the U.S. on national security grounds, but Carr said equipment from those companies often wind up in U.S. products by providing services that don’t fall under the current legal definition of international telecommunications authority.

Commissioner Olivia Trusty, who helped lead the development of the rule, said cybersecurity threats facing telecom networks today “exceed those of any recent era” and that updates must be made to modernize and harden networks.

“In response to these growing hostilities, it is imperative that we re-examine policies that permit access to U.S. networks to ensure that frameworks originally designed to promote economic growth are not exploited in ways that jeopardize our national and economic security,” Trusty said in a statement after the vote passed.

The FCC also passed a third measure that would refuse to recognize any testing or equipment lab based overseas that does not have a reciprocity agreement in place with U.S.-based labs. The rule builds off efforts last year to prohibit telecoms from relying on testing and certification labs that are owned or operated by foreign adversarial countries like China or Russia, which led to the FCC withdrawing or denying certification of 23 overseas labs.

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Campaigns employing commercial surveillance vendors tracked targets by exploiting mobile phone network vulnerabilities in what researchers said Thursday was the first-ever linking of “real-world attack traffic to mobile operator signalling infrastructure.”

The two unknown parties behind the campaigns mimicked the identities of mobile phone operators with customized surveillance tools, and manipulated signaling protocols and steered traffic through network pathways to hide, according to research from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

“Our findings highlight a systemic issue at the core of global telecommunications: operator infrastructure designed to enable seamless international connectivity is being leveraged to support covert surveillance operations that are difficult to monitor, attribute, and regulate,” a report published Thursday reads.

“Despite repeated public reporting, this activity continues unabated and without consequence,” Gary Miller and Swantje Lange wrote for Citizen Lab. “The continued use of mobile networks, built on a close inter-operator trust model and relied upon by users worldwide, raises broader questions for national regulators, policymakers, and the telecom industry about accountability, oversight, and global security.”

The attackers relied on identifiers and infrastructure associated with operators around the world, including networks based in Cambodia, China, the self-governing Island of Jersey, Israel, Italy, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Poland, Rwanda, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Uganda and the United Kingdom.

They shifted between SS7 and Diameter protocols, the signalling protocols known for 3G and 4G/most of 5G, respectively, according to the report. While Diameter was meant to be more secure than SS7, the Federal Communications Commission in 2024 opened a probe into both its vulnerabilities and SS7’s, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has asked for a Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency report about telecommunications vulnerabilities rooted in both protocols.

But identifying the vendors used in the two surveillance campaigns, or who was behind them, was beyond the researchers’ reach.

“The reality is that there are a number of known surveillance vendors and bad actors in this space, but given the opaque nature of telecommunications signalling protocols, those vendors are able to operate without revealing exactly who they really are,” Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, wrote in his newsletter. “Much of the malicious things they are doing blend into the otherwise voluminous flow of billions of normal messages and roaming signals. They are ‘ghost operators’ within the global telecom ecosystem.”

One of the operators mentioned in Citizen Lab’s report, Israel-based 019 Mobile, wrote back that it didn’t recognize the hostnames referenced in the report as 019 Mobile’s network nodes, and couldn’t attribute the signaling activity it represents to 019 Mobile-operated infrastructure.

Another operator, Sure, said it has taken preventative measures to defend against misuse.

“Sure acknowledges that digital services can be misused, which is why we take a number of
steps to mitigate this risk,” CEO Alistair Beak said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Sure has implemented several protective measures to prevent the misuse of signalling services, including monitoring and blocking inappropriate signalling. Any evidence or valid complaint relating to the misuse of Sure’s network results in the service being immediately suspended and, where malicious or inappropriate activity is confirmed following investigation, permanently terminated.”

019 Mobile and a third operator, Tango Networks UK, didn’t respond to requests for comment from CyberScoop. The Citizen Lab report afforded some grace to the operators.

“It is important to note that the operator signalling addresses observed in the attacks do not necessarily imply direct operator involvement,” it states. “In some cases, access to the signalling ecosystem can be obtained through third-party providers, commercial leasing arrangements, or other intermediary services that allow actors to send messages using operator identifiers from legitimate networks.”

Updated 4/24/26: to include quote from Alistair Beak.

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The Federal Communications Commission is moving to crack down on illegal robocalls and the use of foreign call centers.

At a meeting Thursday, the three-member commission unanimously approved a new proposed regulation to increase certification and disclosure requirements for obtaining phone numbers, while also expanding those same requirements to all providers seeking phone numbers from the North American Numbering Plan Administrator and resellers.

The rule – which will be shaped through public comments – is meant to make it more difficult for spammers, scammers and other illegal robocallers to obtain legitimate phone numbers. The FCC’s Office of Communications said a majority of the agency’s investigations into illegal robocalling have involved resold numbers.

It would also impose stricter disclosure requirements on telecoms about the callers on their networks and their identities, information that will assist organizations like the Industry Traceback Group track and identify robocallers as their calls hop across the nation’s patchwork, decentralized telephone networks.

Commissioner Anna Gomez said the proposed rules would help raise the bar for bad actors to obtain valid phone numbers and help close gaps in reporting that make it harder for industry and regulators to find and expunge robocallers from networks.

“Right now, bad actors are exploiting gaps in a phone number system that was designed for a simpler time,” Gomez said.

The commission plans to explore a range of solutions to strengthen numbering requirements and policies, including cracking down on common tactics that rely heavily on resold numbers — like number cycling where “service providers churn through large quantities of telephone numbers [on] a rotating and even single-use basis to evade detection.”

Commissioner Olivia Trusty said that while changes in technology and the marketplace have brought significant benefits to consumers, it has also “made it more difficult to identify who is using telephone numbers and for what purposes, complicating both robocall enforcement and numbering administration.”

Last month, the FCC finalized regulations that require telecoms to annually certify that their caller information is accurate and provide updated information to the agency’s Robocall Mitigation Database. 

A separate proposed regulation passed by the commission Thursday would place new restrictions on the ability of U.S. telephone providers to outsource their call-center services to foreign countries. It specifically asks about the feasibility of giving consumers the option to require that their calls be routed to U.S.-based call centers, requiring calls involving “certain types of sensitive information” to be processed at U.S. locations, requiring providers to disclose the use of overseas centers to callers during a call and requiring operators to speak proficient English.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr touted the initiative as part of the Trump administration’s stated efforts to convince American companies to onshore more of their services in the U.S.

But organizations like the AARP have also found that overseas call centers operating outside of U.S. or international law play a big role in the nation’s robocalling epidemic. In a press conference after the meeting, Carr echoed that sentiment, claiming that some criminal scammers plaguing Americans today first broke into the industry by working at outsourced call centers.

“I think it also helps us crack down on some of the illegal robocallers,” Carr said about the new onshoring rules. “At the end of the day, I think American callers should expect and deserve to reach American call centers.”

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The U.S. government shouldn’t rigidly stick to traditional designations about which agency takes the lead on engaging with critical infrastructure sectors, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Tuesday.

Sector risk management agency designations have long governed which agency is at the forefront of government efforts to protect each of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors, with CISA responsible for eight of them.

“When we look at our sector risk management agency construct, that’s important for a lot of reasons, It’s less important to abide by that strictly and say ‘CISA is the Sector Risk Management Agency for telecommunications,’” CISA’s Nick Andersen said at an event hosted by Auburn University’s McCrary Institute.

Rather, when responding to cyber incidents or undertaking other engagements with the private sector, the question should be who has the best relationship with a certain sector.

“We may have some owner-operators within a certain critical infrastructure sector that maybe the person they’re best positioned to receive resources from is us, or maybe it’s [Department of] Energy, or maybe it’s EPA, or maybe it’s FBI or NSA, or so forth and so on,” he said. “We just have to be comfortable with taking off those blinders and saying, ‘I don’t necessarily need to be in charge all the time no matter who I am. I just need to make sure that this owner-operator has the best partner teed up to lead that engagement.’”

The goal is to avoid another “Guam situation,” where “everybody was racing to Guam the last couple of years like kids chasing a soccer ball,” Andersen said. Guam was the site of critical infrastructure attacks on U.S. military bases that Microsoft pinned on the Chinese hacking group Volt Typhoon in 2023.

An attack on the telecommunications sector from another “Typhoon” group, Salt Typhoon, prompted questions about whether CISA’s hands are too full with all of its sector risk management agency responsibilities. House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., raised concerns last year about how CISA handled its sector risk management agency role for the telecommunications sector after the Salt Typhoon campaign was uncovered.

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Two years ago, it was revealed that Chinese hackers had compromised at least ten U.S. telecoms, giving them broad access to phone data affecting nearly all Americans. Since then, public officials charged with responding to the campaign and bolstering the nation’s cyber defenses have reported a common problem.

Many of their constituents struggle to understand why the hacks – carried out by a group called Salt Typhoon – should rank among their top concerns, or how it impacts their day to day lives.

Some state and federal officials worry that this lack of interest is depriving policymakers the public pressure needed to build momentum for stronger action to improve the nation’s telecommunications cybersecurity.

Mike Geraghty, the CISO and director of the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Cell, said New Jersey is the nation’s most densely populated state, with a high concentration of critical infrastructure and a major telecommunications footprint. For that reason, a campaign like Salt Typhoon should, in theory, be of strong interest to Garden State residents.

“However, if you talk to a person on the street in New Jersey, they’’ll say who cares that the Chinese are looking at – you know – what numbers I call?” he said Wednesday at the Billington State and Local Cybersecurity Summit. “It has a big role to play in my job, but trying to get people to understand what that means for New Jersey is really difficult.”

Congress hasn’t passed comprehensive privacy legislation in decades. Meanwhile, cyberattacks that expose sensitive data are widespread, and U.S. companies routinely collect and sell customers’ personal information. Some officials speculate that, taken together, these trends have left Americans numb to data theft and data-for-profit–so additional breaches feel like just another drop in the bucket.

Mischa Beckett, deputy chief information security officer and director of cyber threat intelligence at GDIT, said Salt Typhoon’s focus on telecom data can feel like an abstract threat to many Americans. By contrast, other Chinese hacking campaigns like Volt Typhoon suggest potential damage to water plants and electric grids that are easier to grasp.

“It’s maybe a little bit easier to write off a loss of data..and move on, as unfortunate but no big deal,” said Beckett. “I think that case is much harder to make when we’re talking about pre-positioning and critical infrastructure, things that touch all of our lives every day.”

Last year, a former intelligence official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told CyberScoop that a lack of outrage from the public following the Salt Typhoon attacks was dampening momentum for broader regulation or reforms to telecom cybersecurity.

“We can’t accept this level of espionage on our networks,” said Laura Galante who led the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center under the Biden administration. “If you had 50 Chinese [Ministry of State Security] spies or contractors sitting inside a major [telecom company’s] building, they would be walked out and it would be a full-scale effort. That’s in broad strokes what has happened, but the access was digital.”

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