U.S. government officials said that the China-backed hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon are still inside some of the networks of America’s largest phone and internet providers, weeks after the long-running hacking campaign first came to light.
Cybersecurity agency CISA said in a call with reporters the affected telecom giants are still trying to evict the hackers, in part because it’s unclear what the hackers are aiming to accomplish.
News first broke in October that Salt Typhoon was reportedly deep inside the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), among others. T-Mobile said it was targeted but largely rebuffed the attackers. The access allowed the Chinese hackers to access real-time unencrypted calls and text messages, as well as metadata about who the communications were sent to and from, as they traveled over the phone carriers’ networks.
U.S. officials believe the industry-wide hacks may be China trying to carry out a wide-ranging spying operation, as the hackers were found accessing the communications of U.S. officials and senior Americans, including presidential candidates. Salt Typhoon is also believed to be targeting systems that house much of the U.S. government’s requests, which may help to identify Chinese individuals under U.S. government surveillance.
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“Encryption is your friend; whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication,” said the CISA official.
Signal Private Messenger is free open source, works on everything. Your grandma could use this.
I have slowly migrated all of my friends and family to this over the last few years.
All of the big ‘encrypted’ messengers like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger use the Signal Protocol under the hood but insert their own shady business and tracking defeating a lot of the purpose.
There are other perhaps more anonymous options like SimpleX or XMRchat but they are not practical nor needed for most threat models.
Matrix is not quite mature enough but is a better option than discord for gaming communities.
Signal everyday. I would not recommend Telegram. DYOR.
Yep, Signal has been the obvious best combination of actual security and ease of use for quite a while now…
But most people that I interact with are still on the level of ‘everyone knows Apple is more secure than Android, so anything on an iPhone is fine’ or ‘wtf undont have a SnapChat? Everyone has a snapchat’.