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.

The post FCC tightens KYC rules for telecoms, closes loophole for banned foreign services appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.

The post Surveillance campaigns use commercial surveillance tools to exploit long-known telecom vulnerabilities appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.”

The post FCC pushes new rules to crack down on robocallers, foreign call centers appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.

The post CISA official advises agencies not to get too hung up on who takes lead in critical infrastructure sectors appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.”

The post Officials worry Salt Typhoon apathy is killing momentum for tougher telecom security rules appeared first on CyberScoop.

Taiwan endured a year-long intensified cyber offensive from China in 2025, that targeted the government and critical infrastructure — with an increasing focus on the energy and hospital sectors, according to a Taiwan government analysis published this week.

Cyberattacks from China rose 6% compared to 2024, the National Security Bureau analysis concluded. Every major sector saw intrusion attempts from “China’s cyber army,” with 2.63 million intrusion attempts per day.

The attacks ranged from ransomware attacks attempting to steal data from hospitals and sell it on the dark web, to more politically-oriented missions.

“China’s cyberattacks have been conducted in conjunction with political and military coercive actions,” the bureau wrote. “In 2025, relevant hacking and intrusion operations against Taiwan demonstrated a certain extent of correlation with the joint combat readiness patrols carried out by the People’s Liberation Army. In addition, China would ramp up hacking activities during Taiwan’s major ceremonies, the issuances of important government statements, or overseas visits by high-level Taiwanese officials.”

Beijing considers Taiwan its territory, and U.S. military officials have for years warned of a possible pending Chinese invasion of the island, with predictions that 2027 could be the pivotal year. 

China deployed a variety of hacking techniques in 2025, but exploitation of software and hardware vulnerabilities factored into more than half of the operations, according to Taiwan.

Last year’s revelations about Chinese infiltration of major telecommunications providers extended into Taiwan, with hackers targeting telecom networks there to get into sensitive and backup communications links, the bureau wrote. 

“The hacking activities were also extended to upstream, midstream, and downstream suppliers in the semiconductor and defense sectors,” the bureau said. “Those campaigns sought to steal advanced technologies, industrial plans, and decision-making intelligence.”

The U.S. government should fortify Taiwan against China’s cyber-enabled economy warfare (CEEW), Jack Burnham, a senior research analyst in the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in response to the Taiwan report.

“As Beijing continues to target Taiwan across the cyber domain, the United States should prepare to counter a Chinese CEEW campaign aimed at Taipei,” he wrote. “Washington should strengthen its efforts to work against a potential blockade by practicing convoy operations, pursuing a regional energy stockpile, assisting in strengthening the resilience of Taiwan’s critical infrastructure by deploying technical advisors, and signaling its resolve to deter Beijing well in advance of a potential crisis.”

China routinely denies all hacking allegations, and has leveled its own accusations of hacking malfeasance at Taiwan.

The post Taiwan blames Chinese ‘cyber army’ for rise in millions of daily intrusion attempts appeared first on CyberScoop.

With a little more than a month left before a foundational cyber threat information sharing law expires for a second time, Congress might have to do another short-term extension as negotiations on a longer deal aren’t yet bearing fruit, a key lawmaker said Tuesday.

House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., said the problem with a long-term extension of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which provides legal protections to companies to share cyber threat data with the federal government and other companies, is that there are three different views about how to approach it.

The Trump administration and some in the Senate want a clean, 10-year reauthorization of the law, which Congress extended last month until Jan. 30 as part of the legislation that ended the government shutdown, after the information sharing law lapsed in October. But a reauthorization without any changes could run into House opposition, Garbarino said.

“I don’t know if I can get that passed in the House, with concerns from the Freedom Caucus,” he said at an event hosted by Auburn University’s McCrary Institute. The Freedom Caucus has had criticism of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that is integral to implementing the 2015 law.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., also has a version of the bill that focuses largely on language he said is needed to defend free speech. And Garbarino’s version takes yet another approach to tweaking the law.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re close enough with the discussions on the Senate to get it to figure out which bill will pass and what will get done,” Garbarino said. That leaves another extension tied to any funding bill that replaces the legislation currently funding the government, which also runs through Jan. 30.

Garbarino said his committee also is working on other issues, like deconflicting federal cybersecurity regulations, the cyber workforce and responding to the Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon breaching telecommunications networks.

A report on “regulatory harmonization” has been underway at the committee, he said. But that doesn’t mean he wants to roll all the rules back. Asked about the Federal Communications Commission voting to get rid of Biden administration-era rules put into place in response to the Salt Typhoon breach, Garbarino said, “I’m not sure I would’ve voted to get rid of some of the protections or the rules, but it wasn’t my vote.”

The committee has been probing the government’s response to Salt Typhoon, and recently sent another set of questions in the past two or three months after not getting satisfactory answers the first time, Garbarino said.

“We are working closely with the China Select Committee as to what legislatively we could move if there’s something,” he said. “We’re not there yet.” 

Rep. Sheri Biggs, R-S.C., has picked up the baton on cyber workforce legislation sponsored by Garbarino’s predecessor as chairman, and Garbarino said he expects there to be some changes to the bill.

And two House Homeland subcommittees are holding a hearing Wednesday on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

“I’ll tell you right now, with our adversaries, the way they’re going to use AI, we can’t defend with human intervention alone,” Garbarino said. “AI is going to have to be part of our cyber defense.”

The post Key lawmaker says Congress likely to kick can down road on cyber information sharing law appeared first on CyberScoop.

Attackers associated with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) have targeted Western-based critical infrastructure with a special focus on the energy sector as part of an ongoing campaign dating back to 2021, Amazon Threat Intelligence said in a report Monday. 

The threat group simplified operations earlier this year by shifting away from vulnerability exploitation to focus on misconfigured network edge devices hosted on Amazon Web Services as the primary initial access vector, CJ Moses, chief information security officer of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a blog post. 

Researchers said malicious infrastructure used by the attackers overlaps with operations linked to Sandworm, also known as APT44 and Seashell Blizzard, a detail that gives them confidence the activity is associated with Russia’s GRU. 

Amazon did not say how many attacks it’s attributed to the campaign, nor how the pace of activity has changed since the first wave of attacks occurred in 2021. The company said it has notified customers affected by the intrusions, remediated compromised EC2 instances and shared intelligence with partners and affected vendors to aid further investigations.

The Russia state-sponsored threat group has continued to target multiple Western-based organizations in the energy sector including electric utilities, energy providers and managed security service providers specializing in the industry, according to Amazon. 

Researchers said the threat group has also targeted collaboration platforms, source code repositories, organizations with cloud-based network infrastructure, critical infrastructure providers in North America and Europe, and telecom providers across multiple regions. 

Attacks typically begin with a compromised customer network edge device hosted on AWS, followed by attempts to capture data traversing the network in a bid to steal credentials and reuse those credentials against victim organizations’ other services and infrastructure to maintain access, according to Amazon.

Moses insists the compromise of network edge devices hosted on AWS is not due to a weakness in its  infrastructure, but rather improper device setup from customers. Attackers associated with Russia’s GRU have targeted enterprise routers and routing infrastructure, virtual private networks for large organizations, remote-access gateways and network-management appliances. 

The campaign initially relied on vulnerability exploitation from 2021 to 2024, including CVE-2022-26318 affecting WatchGuard, CVE-2021-26084 and CVE-2023-22518 affecting Confluence and CVE-2023-27532 affecting Veeam, researchers said.

Yet, targeting shifted to misconfigured network edge devices this year, which allowed attackers to achieve the same strategic goals at a lower cost. 

“While customer misconfiguration targeting has been ongoing since at least 2022, the actor maintained sustained focus on this activity in 2025 while reducing investment in zero-day and N-day exploitation,” Moses said in the blog post. “The actor accomplishes this while significantly reducing the risk of exposing their operations through more detectable vulnerability exploitation activity.”

Sandworm is one of the most notorious state-sponsored threat groups of the past decade. The group primarily targets government, defense, transportation, energy, media and civil society organizations in Russia’s near abroad. It has repeatedly targeted Western electoral systems and institutions, including in NATO member countries. On three separate occasions, the group has succeeded in using a cyberattack to disrupt electricity distribution in Ukraine.

The post Amazon warns that Russia’s Sandworm has shifted its tactics appeared first on CyberScoop.

A House Republican introduced legislation Tuesday aimed at deterring cyberattacks against the United States at a time when the Trump administration is prioritizing the punishment of malicious hackers.

Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, revived legislation he first sponsored in 2022, the Cyber Deterrence and Response Act. The legislation would direct the executive branch to formally designate foreign parties behind major cyberattacks against the United States as a “critical cyber threat actor” who would be subject to sanctions.  It also would establish a framework for attributing who’s behind cyber attacks, including contributions from cyber agencies and threat intelligence companies.

“As cyberattacks in the United States grow more sophisticated and widespread, we must ensure the Trump administration and all future administrations have a strong framework to hold bad actors accountable and safeguard our national security,” Pfluger said in a news release. “Protecting America’s critical infrastructure from malicious cyberattacks is essential, and this bill does exactly that.”

The legislation is the latest reflection of congressional dismay that began growing last year in response to the Salt Typhoon cyberespionage campaign that infiltrated telecommunications networks, and the sense that the United States wasn’t doing enough to make hackers pay for their behavior.

At a hearing Tuesday, Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Tex., said the United States needs to do a better job of working “together to detect and deter attacks in real time.”

The Trump administration has said deterrence is one of the first pillars of its forthcoming cyber strategy.

The definition of “critical cyber threat actor” under Pfluger’s bill applies to hackers who disrupt the availability of computer networks, compromise computers that provide services in critical infrastructure, steal significant personal data or trade secrets, destabilize the financial or energy sectors or undermine the election process.

The president could waive sanctions against those designees if it explains its reasoning to Congress in writing, a common clause of sanctions legislation.

Pfluger’s measure is updated in some ways from its 2022 incarnation, such as by giving the Office of the National Cyber Director the leading role in designating critical cyber actors.

The legislation draws on bills that former Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla, introduced in past years. That legislation won House approval in 2018, but never advanced further.

The post Legislation would designate ‘critical cyber threat actors,’ direct sanctions against them appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday dropped its case against SolarWinds and its chief information security officer over its handling of an alleged Russian cyberespionage campaign uncovered in 2020, an incident that penetrated at least nine federal agencies and hundreds of companies.

The SEC’s decision brings to a halt one of the more divisive steps under the Biden administration to hold companies’ feet to the fire over their security failings, a groundbreaking suit that a judge last year dismissed in significant measure.

It comes the same day the Federal Communications Commission rescinded Biden-era cyber regulations the FCC wrote in response to another major cyberespionage campaign that saw alleged Chinese hackers infiltrate telecommunications carriers.

Two years ago the SEC took action against SolarWinds and its CISO, Tim Brown, over claims that it didn’t adequately disclose the Sunburst attack that began in 2019, as well as over other security assertions the company made.

The SEC litigation notice Thursday didn’t explain why it had dropped the case. An SEC spokesperson declined to comment beyond the notice.

A SolarWinds spokesperson said the company welcomed the SEC decision. The mere threat of SEC action two years ago had panicked some cyber executives who said it could create a chilling effect to disclose cyber information.

“We fought with conviction, arguing that the facts demonstrated our team acted appropriately — this outcome is a welcome vindication of that position,” the spokesperson said in a statement about how it was “delighted” on behalf of the company and Brown. “We hope this resolution eases the concerns many CISOs have voiced about this case and the potential chilling effect it threatened to impose on their work. With the case now resolved, we look forward to focusing without distraction on delivering exceptional value to our customers through our market-leading software and solutions, emphasizing security and innovation at every step.”

The post SEC drops case against SolarWinds tied to monumental breach appeared first on CyberScoop.

Congressional leaders are pressing federal agencies to provide more information on their plans to compete with China on a range of tech and cybersecurity issues, including a strategy for promoting American 6G telecommunications infrastructure and limiting Chinese tech in US supply chains.

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., ranking member on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week asking for an update on the department’s work building international coalitions around 6G.

In the letter, dated Oct. 30 and shared exclusively with CyberScoop, he called for the department to share details on how its is fighting to shape international norms, global technical standards and supply chains in favor of U.S. and non-Chinese companies and technologies, saying “diplomacy can, and must, play a key role in this strategy.”

“While it remains essential that we continue to address the threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to dominate 5G, we must also look forward to how we can outcompete the CCP in the next frontier of wireless competition,” he wrote.

In an interview with CyberScoop, Krishnamoorthi called on Rubio to build on the work that prior administrations have done marshalling international consensus around 5G security and technical standards, while also learning from past mistakes, which allowed Chinese telecom companies like Huawei and ZTE to gain significant global influence. 

“We have underestimated the impact of 5G and didn’t invest enough in our own innovative capacity, or push for domestic and trusted partners to produce that technology and be able to purchase from them,” he said.

Further, he said the U.S. failed to match Chinese efforts to shape international technical standards around 5G implementation, which allowed China to increase  its global influence and set technology standards that benefit its own industries.

The country is already laying a similar groundwork to influence the 6G space: Krishnamoorthi noted that a group promoting Chinese technical standards has already signed an agreement with European industry associations to research 6G networks and services, while this past May an annual 6G global summit was, for the first time, hosted in China and sponsored by major Chinese entities like China Mobile, ZTE and the Hong Kong Communications Authority.

With 5G, “we didn’t recognize the power of…taking leadership in organizations that set standards with regard to our technology,” he said, something the U.S. can’t afford to repeat with 6G.

Further, Krishamoorthi said Congress was able to come to a consensus on banning Chinese the use of tech from Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese telecoms in U.S. networks, but criticized the body for failing to properly set aside fund the replacement of that equipment, which Chinese companies often sold at far cheaper prices than domestic alternatives.

The U.S. government created a regulatory environment where they “allowed everyone to buy whatever the heck they wanted to buy,” which often led US networks to opt for much cheaper Chinese equipment.

“We came back and said you have to rip it all out, and we, the federal government, will try to provide resources to replace it,” he said. “We never came up with the resources to replace it, they ended up having to rip it out and now there are patches to the country without access to the type of broadband coverage that they deserve.”

Last year, Congress did approve $3 billion to fund rip-and-replacement of Chinese technologies, but industry groups have long complained that the government’s initial tranche of funding for the initiative was insufficient.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. reached international agreements with nine other countries – The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Czechia, France, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and Finland – on a set of principles for “Secure, Open and Resilient by Design” technologies and infrastructure around 6G.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration also invited experts from the public to help map out a long-term strategy to support U.S. advancements in 6G telecommunications infrastructure.

The responses from industry, academia and tech experts emphasized the importance of fostering US growth in Open Radio Access Network technologies, a critical gap in U.S. and western supply chains, robust security and privacy frameworks and AI-integration.

 Congressional Republicans are also scrutinizing how federal agencies are accounting for Chinese technology lobbying efforts on the world stage. A joint letter Wednesday from House Republican leaders on the House Homeland Security, CCP, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees requested a briefing with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and pressed the department to “investigate and restrict adversary products in other critical and emerging industries to protect the U.S. market from technology threats,” particularly from China.

The members wrote that connected critical infrastructure has “whittled away geographic borders” and created new threats of foreign sabotage or control that US policy must account for, including Chinese made technologies in artificial intelligence, automated machinery and robotics, IOT devices, semiconductor cores and industrial SCADA software.

“We have already seen through a variety of cyber-attacks against the United States that China views information technology as a battlefield,” wrote Reps. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., John Moolenaar, R-Mich., Bill Huzienga, R-Mich., Rick Crawford, R-La., and Brian Mast, R-Fl. “A compromised power grid, an infiltrated telecommunications network, or a manipulated industrial control system can pose as great a threat as a kinetic military strike.”

The post Congressional leaders want an executive branch strategy on China 6G, tech supply chain appeared first on CyberScoop.