Samuel Morse transmitted the first message ("What hath God wrought") over the Baltimore–Washington line on May 24, 1844, exposing physical wiretapping along unencrypted DC lines almost immediately.
Alexander Graham Bell was granted US Patent 174,465 for the telephone, introducing analog voice circuits that immediately opened new attack surfaces for inductive and galvanic eavesdropping.
Undertaker Almon Strowger patented the first automated stepping switch after suspecting manual telephone operators were diverting his business calls to a competing undertaker.
After RMS Titanic sank in April 1912, Congress amended the Wireless Ship Act on 23 July 1912 (two operators, continuous watch, auxiliary power) and passed the Radio Act on 13 August 1912, requiring federal licences for all US radio stations.
Signed by President Roosevelt on 19 June 1934, the Communications Act abolished the Federal Radio Commission and created the Federal Communications Commission, uniting regulation of interstate telephone, telegraph and radio under one agency.
US Patent 2,292,387, filed on 10 June 1941 and granted on 11 August 1942, described a radio guidance link for torpedoes that hopped between carrier frequencies in step at transmitter and receiver to resist jamming. The US Navy did not adopt it during the war.
Bell Labs and Alan Turing developed SIGSALY (Project X), the world's first digital voice encryption terminal, securing high-level Allied communications between Washington and London during WWII.
Shannon's paper in the Bell System Technical Journal (vol. 28, no. 4, October 1949, pp. 656–715) put cryptography on a mathematical footing. It was a declassified version of his confidential 1945 Bell Labs report "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography".
Seven-year-old blind boy Joe Engressia discovered that whistling an exact 2600 Hz pitch into a receiver reset AT&T toll trunk lines, founding the phone-phreaking movement.
Launched on 10 July 1962 (a privately funded AT&T satellite launched by NASA), Telstar 1 relayed the first public live transatlantic television on 23 July 1962. Radiation from the US Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test, detonated the day before launch, contributed to its command system failing in November 1962.
John Draper ("Captain Crunch"), Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and others built Blue Boxes that emitted 2600 Hz plus MF digit tones to make free global calls, industrializing the SF signaling flaw.
In a decision adopted on 26 June 1968 (13 F.C.C.2d 420), the FCC held that AT&T's tariff ban on customer-supplied equipment was unreasonable and unlawful, allowing devices like Thomas Carter's Carterfone to connect to the telephone network.
Ron Rosenbaum published 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' in Esquire, exposing the technical mechanics of 2600 Hz phone phreaking, Captain Crunch, and homebrew Blue Box construction to a global audience.
On 29 October 1975, NSA Director Lew Allen publicly confirmed to the Church Committee that, from 1945 to May 1975, the major US international telegraph carriers secretly passed copies of international telegrams to the NSA without warrants (SHAMROCK). Watch lists including US citizens were run against this traffic (MINARET).
AT&T deployed Common Channel Interoffice Signaling (CCIS) across its toll network, separating call control signaling into a dedicated data network and neutralizing acoustic blue box toll fraud.
Phreakers engineered specialized Red Boxes simulating payphone coin drop frequencies (1700 Hz + 2200 Hz) and Silver Boxes with modified DTMF keypads to seize military Autovon priority override circuits.
Judge Harold Greene ordered the breakup of AT&T's monopoly into 7 Regional Bell Operating Companies (Baby Bells), creating multi-operator interconnects and new signaling boundaries.
Ameritech launched the first commercial 1G AMPS cellular network in Chicago, but cleartext transmission of ESN and MIN identifiers quickly led to widespread over-the-air cellular cloning.
In January 1984, Eric Corley (writing as "Emmanuel Goldstein") and David Ruderman began publishing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The title refers to the 2600 Hz trunk-seizure tone, and the first issue appeared in the same month AT&T was broken up. Phrack followed on 17 November 1985, published on the St. Louis "Metal Shop" BBS.
John R. MacDougall overpowered HBO's satellite broadcast feed with a 2,000-watt transmitter to protest unscrambling subscription fees, exposing commercial satellite uplink vulnerabilities.
An unknown pirate broadcaster overpowered the terrestrial microwave Studio-Transmitter Links (STL) of WGN-TV and PBS station WTTW in Chicago, broadcasting distorted Max Headroom audio and video into thousands of homes.
TAT-8 became the first transoceanic fiber-optic cable in service, scaling transatlantic telecommunications capacity to 40,000 circuits and revolutionizing global data connectivity.
A single line of buggy C code in a 4ESS switch patch caused a cascading SS7 recovery storm on January 15, 1990, dropping roughly 60 million calls over nine hours.
In 1990 US federal agents moved against the phreaking underground: Legion of Doom member Robert Riggs ("The Prophet") and Phrack editor Craig Neidorf ("Knight Lightning") were indicted over a stolen BellSouth E911 document, while the separate, Arizona-based Secret Service Operation Sundevil raided BBS operators in about a dozen cities on 7–9 May 1990.
On 16 April 1993 the White House announced the NSA-designed Clipper Chip, a voice-encryption chip whose keys would be escrowed with the government; it was adopted as FIPS 185 in February 1994, and in 1994 AT&T Bell Labs researcher Matt Blaze showed the escrow mechanism could be bypassed.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) forced US telecom carriers to design their networks so that lawful interception could be performed on demand — embedding a permanent surveillance capability into the core of every switch.
Tsutomu Shimomura and the FBI tracked and arrested Kevin Mitnick in Raleigh, North Carolina using direction-finding antennas and cellular switchboard real-time ESN/MIN location triggers.
Underground syndicates commercialized "Clone King" EPROM modification kits, allowing widespread cellular subscription fraud and free international calls across North American carriers.
David Wagner and Ian Goldberg (UC Berkeley ISAAC Group) completely cracked the GSM COMP128-1 algorithm, allowing extraction of SIM master keys (Ki) and physical cloning of SIM cards.
After TFreak (Dan Moschuk) released smurf.c in October 1997, attackers spoofed ICMP Echo Requests to the directed-broadcast addresses of misconfigured networks, turning every responding host into an amplifier and flooding victims' uplinks — prompting CERT/CC Advisory CA-1998-01 in January 1998.
In February 2005, Paris Hilton's Sidekick address book, notes and photos — synchronized to Danger's servers and reachable through T-Mobile's customer website — were posted online after attackers took over her account. A Massachusetts teenager, later identified as Cameron LaCroix, pleaded guilty in September 2005.
In 2006 retired AT&T technician Mark Klein filed a sworn declaration and internal documents in EFF's Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit (filed 31 January 2006) describing a secret NSA-controlled room, 641A, at AT&T's San Francisco facility that received a copy of AT&T's internet backbone traffic.
On 8 July 2008, Dan Kaminsky and DNS vendors released coordinated patches for a fundamental DNS cache-poisoning flaw (CVE-2008-1447, CERT VU#800113) affecting ISP resolvers worldwide; full details followed at Black Hat USA in August 2008.
On 10 August 2008 at DEF CON 16, Alex Pilosov and Anton "Tony" Kapela showed in "Stealing The Internet: An Internet-Scale Man In The Middle Attack" that a BGP prefix hijack could be turned into a stealthy interception: they diverted traffic bound for the conference network to a system in New York and delivered it back to Las Vegas.
In September 2011 the Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI had located fraud suspect Daniel Rigmaiden with a "StingRay" cell-site simulator, and his court challenge became the first U.S. case to test the device; EPIC's 2012 FOIA suit then forced release of FBI StingRay records (2012–2013), and ACLU public-records work (2014–2015) showed widespread, often warrantless state and local use.
The US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence published a bipartisan investigative report concluding that Huawei and ZTE equipment posed systemic national security risks to critical telecom backbones.
On 17 December 2015 Juniper disclosed "unauthorized code" in ScreenOS: an administrative authentication backdoor (CVE-2015-7755) and a change enabling passive decryption of VPN traffic (CVE-2015-7756).
Joshua Drake of Zimperium zLabs disclosed in July 2015 a set of critical memory-corruption flaws in Android's Stagefright media library — CVE-2015-1538 plus the related CVE-2015-1539, CVE-2015-3824, CVE-2015-3826, CVE-2015-3827, CVE-2015-3828, CVE-2015-3829 and CVE-2015-3864 — that let an attacker run code on an estimated 950 million phones via a single silently received MMS video.
Daniel Roesler's 2015 proof-of-concept showed that the WebRTC JavaScript APIs in Chrome and Firefox let any web page collect a user's private LAN addresses and real public IP — even behind an active VPN. The behaviour had already been tracked by Mozilla as Bugzilla 959893 ("WebRTC Internal IP Address Leakage"); it was treated as a privacy design issue and received no CVE.
On 17 April 2016, CBS 60 Minutes aired "Hacking Your Phone," in which Karsten Nohl's SRLabs team in Berlin, knowing only the number of an iPhone lent to Rep. Ted Lieu (with his consent), tracked the device and recorded his calls via SS7.
On 21 October 2016, waves of DDoS traffic from the Mirai botnet hit Dyn's Managed DNS platform, making Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, Netflix, PayPal and other Dyn customers unreachable for many users in North America and Europe.
On 24 April 2018, attackers announced Amazon Route 53 address space from eNet (AS10297), a hosting provider in Columbus, Ohio, hijacking DNS for MyEtherWallet.com for about two hours and stealing roughly $150,000 in Ether.
In May 2019 U.S. prosecutors in Michigan charged six members of the hacking group "The Community" and three former mobile-carrier employees (two at AT&T stores, one at Verizon) over SIM swaps used to steal more than $2.4 million in cryptocurrency, documenting insider bribery as a SIM-swap channel. The pattern persisted: the FCC adopted SIM-swap and port-out rules in November 2023, and in November 2025 the Manhattan DA indicted a ring that included four AT&T and T-Mobile store employees.
On 30 August 2019 the "Chuckling Squad" took over Jack Dorsey's @jack account and posted offensive tweets; Twitter blamed "a security oversight by the mobile provider" that let attackers control the phone number tied to the account.
An attacker only had to ring a WhatsApp call. NSO Group's Pegasus implant was delivered to ~1,400 targets through a buffer overflow in the VoIP call stack — the victim never had to answer, and the missed-call log was the only trace.
On 31 March 2020 the FCC adopted its First Caller ID Authentication Report and Order (FCC 20-42), implementing the December 2019 TRACED Act by requiring voice providers to deploy STIR/SHAKEN in the IP portions of their networks by 30 June 2021.
On 4 October 2021, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger went offline worldwide for about six hours after a maintenance command disconnected Facebook's backbone and its DNS servers withdrew their BGP routes.
In August 2021 T-Mobile US confirmed a breach, later sized at about 76.6 million current, former and prospective customers, exposing names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver's licence data; John Binns, a US citizen living in Turkey, claimed responsibility.
On 24 May 2023 Microsoft and a joint NSA/CISA/FBI and Five Eyes advisory (AA23-144A) exposed Volt Typhoon, a China state-sponsored actor targeting communications and other critical infrastructure in Guam and the United States since mid-2021.
Days before the New Hampshire primary, a cloned AI voice of President Biden urged Democrats not to vote. The FCC responded within weeks by ruling that AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act — making AI voice robocalls illegal outright.
In a 12 July 2024 SEC 8-K, AT&T disclosed that attackers copied call and text records of nearly all its wireless customers (about 109–110 million) from May–October 2022 and 2 January 2023, taken from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform later identified as Snowflake.
Attackers executed an unauthorized SIM swap against the phone number tied to the US SEC official X account, broadcasting a fraudulent Bitcoin ETF approval that caused hundreds of millions in market swings.
Chinese APT group Salt Typhoon breached the core networks of major US telecom providers — AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others — reaching CALEA lawful-intercept systems and sustained metadata and audio collection across at least nine carriers.
SpaceX Starlink and T-Mobile rolled out commercial Direct-to-Cell satellite service, deploying LEO satellites equipped with onboard 3GPP eNodeB cellular base stations connecting standard unmodified LTE/5G smartphones from space.
In May 2025, after a photo showed national security adviser Mike Waltz using TeleMessage's modified Signal app, 404 Media reported a hacker had accessed archived messages from its servers; owner Smarsh suspended all TeleMessage services on 5 May.