With less than 10 days to go before the highly-anticipated US presidential election, reports have surfaced that hackers working with the Chinese government have attempted to block audio from American political figures, including an unnamed campaign adviser for former Republican president Donald Trump.
The Washington Postin the report, it revealed that the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the US are investigating an incident in which unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure was allowed, by people linked to China.
The Trump campaign and the FBI have not released any statement related to the incident. The report also added that hackers also accessed unencrypted communications such as text messages.
In a previous report, the Reuters news agency reported that hackers from China targeted the phones used by people associated with the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Former President Trump and his partner JD Vance were also targeted, according to various media reports last week.
Earlier this year, the Trump campaign was hacked by Iranian hackers. The US Department of Justice has charged three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps with hacking, accusing them of trying to disrupt the November 5 US presidential election.
According to the report of New York TimesThe Trump campaign was informed last week that the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates were among a number of people inside and outside of government whose phone numbers were targeted through the intrusion of the Verizon system.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said last week that it was not aware of such hacking attempts and added that Beijing opposes and fights against all kinds of cyber attacks.