Salt Typhoon
Salt Typhoon (GhostEmperor / Earth Estries / FamousSparrow / UNC2286 / OperatorPanda / G1045) is a Chinese state-sponsored cyber-espionage actor attributed to the People's Republic of China Ministry of State Security and operated through the Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co. Ltd. commercial contractor (US Treasury OFAC SDN designation September 2025); active since at least 2019 with the September 2025 CISA / FBI / NSA / CNMF / Five Eyes joint cybersecurity advisory AA25-239A formally establishing PRC-state attribution.
emerged into international public consciousness with the October 2024 disclosure of compromise of multiple major US telecommunications carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Lumen Technologies, T-Mobile, and at least five others, nine carriers per Senator Cantwell's December 2025 testimony), among the most consequential US cyber-intelligence incidents in modern history.
intrusions persisted for months to years with Cisco's 2025 disclosure documenting at least one three-year dwell time, with the compromise extending to CALEA lawful-intercept (wiretap) systems giving visibility into US surveillance subjects, call metadata, real-time location tracking, and text-message content of millions of Americans, presidential campaign communications (Trump, Vance, Harris-Walz November 2024), senior government officials' communications, US state Army National Guard networks (early-2024 administrator-credential and network-diagram compromise), and Viasat satellite communications (mid-2025 ground-infrastructure compromise); global scope expanded by December 2024 to 80+ countries with FBI notification of over 600 organizations.
tradecraft hallmarks include network-device-focused initial access via Cisco IOS XE / Juniper / Ivanti Connect Secure / Sophos Firewall / Fortinet FortiClient EMS exploitation, supply-chain compromise via telecom vendors (T1199 trusted relationship), the GhostSpider modular backdoor (Trend Micro November 2024) as signature implant, the historical Demodex Windows kernel rootkit (Kaspersky October 2021 GhostEmperor), network-device firmware modification (T1601), network sniffing on compromised telecom switches (T1040), PAM authentication-process modification (T1556.003), extensive living-off-the-land tradecraft, and unprecedented long-term-persistence posture complementing Volt Typhoon (US CI pre-positioning), Flax Typhoon (Raptor Train ORB / Taiwan), and Gallium (historical global telecom) in the modern PRC telecom-and-pre-positioning operational ecosystem.