CNN
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American officials believe Hackers linked to the Chinese government targeted the calls and written data of Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, as the scale of a large-scale cyber-espionage campaign targeting senior figures in the Republican and Democratic parties comes into focus just days before the US election, with dozens of people believed to be affected, three people familiar with the matter told CNN.

Former President Donald Trump’s son and son-in-law are joining a the list is growing of top political figures whose phone communications US officials believe were targeted by China’s elite hacking team. Other targets include Trump himself, running mate JD Vance and people affiliated with the Harris-Walz campaign, CNN previously reported. The hackers also targeted prominent Democrats, including the staff of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, another source with knowledge of the matter told CNN.

The purpose of the hack is “much worse than the public knows,” and officials are still probing the intrusions to determine the impact, another source familiar with the information told CNN.

In some cases, the hackers may have had access to their targets’ call and text data for months, the two sources said. The FBI has notified those whose phone data was targeted.

The New York Times was first to report that Eric Trump and Kushner had been targeted.

US officials investigating the hacking campaign, which came through intrusions at US telecommunications firms AT&T, Lumen and Verizon, say it is among the most troubling national security hacks in recent memory and more serious than initial reports suggested by presser.

And the timing of the revelations means the FBI is conducting a sensitive and high-stakes investigation into hacking targeting both the Trump and Harris campaigns, days after the all-important election.

The hackers do not appear to be trying to influence the election itself, as the Iranians who breached Trump’s campaign tried to do earlier this year, according to US officials. But it is trying to collect information about the private communications of senior officials from both sides that would be of great interest to Beijing.

Investigators believe the hackers are also looking for other sensitive national security information, including, in some cases, information about wiretapping warrant requests made by the Justice Department, CNN previously reported.

“It’s real-time wiretapping,” one of the sources told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive and ongoing investigation. “They completely broke the system that the Department of Justice requires (telcos) to maintain for legal access.”

“We might as well let Huawei into the network,” the source added, referring to the Chinese telecom giant that the US has placed restrictions on banning federal networks over espionage concerns.

Eric Trump regularly appears alongside his father on the campaign trail and has served as one of his father’s most prominent surrogates, holding campaign events across the country. Eric’s wife, Lara, was named co-chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year.

Kushner has barely been visible this campaign cycle. Two years ago, his wife Ivanka Trump announced that she and Kushner would step back from politics to focus on their family.

“Does that surprise anyone? Under Kamala and Biden, China has walked all over our country,” Eric Trump said in a statement to CNN.

There is no indication that anyone was able to access data related to Jared Kushner or his devices, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

CNN has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment. China’s embassy in Washington, DC, denied that Beijing-backed hackers had breached US telecommunications firms, calling the reports “a distortion of fact”.

The FBI declined to comment. In a statement last week, the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed they were investigating “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China,” but did not specify who was targeted.

The Trump campaign is operating under the assumption that the hackers may still have access to the phone communications they targeted that belong to Trump and Vance, two of the sources said. The campaign has changed some security protocols, including rotating the use of phones, to try to evade surveillance, one of the sources said.

Evacuating hackers from telecommunications networks has proven difficult. Hackers mix benign Internet traffic into routers and switches, making them difficult to track down, several other sources familiar with their techniques told CNN.

The FBI was tracking the operation of Chinese hackers in telecommunications networks after US officials first learned of the intrusions, one of the sources familiar with the matter said. After the Wall Street Journal first reported on the severity of this month’s hack, the hackers took extra steps to try to elude US investigators, according to the source, who likened it to a game of cat and mouse.

The White House has convened an interagency team to oversee the response to the hack, a move usually reserved for major cybersecurity incidents, three U.S. officials familiar with the matter told CNN. The Washington Post first reported on that process being activated.

Meanwhile, a panel of cybersecurity experts led by the Department of Homeland Security, which probes major hacking incidents, plans to investigate the root causes of China’s hacking campaign, a DHS official told CNN.

On Capitol Hill, the alleged Chinese hack is such a sensitive issue that lawmakers, normally speaking, balk at mentioning it.

“This is a very serious breach that the committee is monitoring on a daily basis,” Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee, told CNN earlier this month. He repeated the same sentence when asked for more details and said he could not share anything more.

Given how widespread China’s hacking campaign has been in US telecommunications networks, some US allies are checking their own computer networks for signs of compromise. Officials in the United Kingdom, for example, have been on high alert for evidence of any impact in Britain from the hacks, but have so far found none, a British official familiar with the matter told CNN.

The ongoing Chinese hacking campaign means that the next administration—whether Trump or Harris wins—will likely inherit another major cybersecurity incident with major national security implications. When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the US government was still dealing with the fallout from a sophisticated attack by Russian intelligence that infiltrated software produced by technology firm SolarWinds to breach several US government agencies.

CNN’s Ted Barrett, Natasha Bertrand, Kaitlan Collins and Kristen Holmes contributed reporting.