This piece is published with support from The Capitol Forum.
A U.S. government cybersecurity official has broken ranks from his agency and publicly revealed that attackers have repeatedly tracked the physical location of people inside the U.S. using vulnerabilities in the backbone of the world’s telecommunications cellular infrastructure in recent years, 404 Media has learned.
The comments from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) official are highly unusual in that they provide an unvarnished assessment of the threat posed by such attacks on U.S. telecommunication networks, acknowledge that these attacks have happened recently even after the country’s telecoms—including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile—claim they have better secured their networks, and that the official decided to speak out publicly seemingly without his agency’s approval.