Salt Typhoon’s Cyber Espionage: Applying the Diamond Model and Assessing Policy Governance
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Bardsley, Mitchell
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Abstract
The People’s Republic of China (PRC)–sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Salt Typhoon conducted a sustained cyber campaign against United States telecommunications providers from 2023 to 2024, resulting in widespread compromise of critical infrastructure and exposure of sensitive communications metadata and law enforcement systems (Miller et al., 2024). This paper applies the Diamond Model to analyze the intrusion, systematically identifying the adversary, capabilities, infrastructure, and victims, extending the framework through social-political and technological meta-features. Living-off-the-land techniques, exploitation of unpatched Cisco vulnerabilities, and abuse of native network protocols enabled covert, long-term persistence and data exfiltration with minimal detection. Evaluating organizational, national, and transnational policy responses, this paper concludes that enforceable national-level centered upon vulnerability disclosure, supply chain accountability, and coordinated federal oversight are the most effective means to mitigate future nation-state campaigns.
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2026
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