WASHINGTON: Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the telecoms companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the Journal said. It said the hackers had also accessed other tranches of internet traffic.

China’s foreign ministry responded on Sunday that it was not aware of the attack described in the report but said the United States had “concocted a false narrative” to “frame” China in the past. “At a time when cybersecurity has become a common challenge for all countries around the world, this erroneous approach will only hinder the efforts of the international community to jointly address the challenge through dialogue and cooperation,” the ministry said in a statement to Reuters.