The FBI have issued a warning as America undergoes one of the largest intelligence compromises in US history.
A massive cyberattack on telecommunication companies such as AT&T and Verizon has led to officials warning against sending texts. They say there is one thing you can do to protect your data though – and that is use encrypted messages.
The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, has managed to infiltrate eight major telecommunication and infrastructure firms in the US.
Two US officials, a senior FBI official who asked not to be named, and Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, recommend using encrypted messages apps to those who want to minimise the chances of their communications being intercepted.
Speaking to NBC, Greene said: ‘Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication.
‘Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible.’
The senior FBI official who wanted to remain anonymous said: ‘People looking to further protect their mobile device communications would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption and phishing resistant multi-factor authentication for email, social media and collaboration tool accounts.’
So how do encrypted messages work?
Essentially, encrypted messages have a tool which converts information into scrambled text which can only be decoded with a ‘secret key’.
This prevents third parties from gaining unauthorised access as only the recipient with the correct decryption key can read it.
The senior officials said that the hackers accessed three types of information.
The first has been call records, or meta data that reveals the numbers that phones called and when. The hackers focused on records around the Washington DC area, and according to NBC the FBI does not intend to alert those whose phone metadata was accessed.
The second has been live phone calls for specific targets but the FBI official declined to reveal how many alerts it had sent out to targets of that campaign.
And the third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in accordance with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track people’s communications.
But the overall message is simple – don’t use basic network text messaging.
So what messaging systems should you use?
iMessage to iMessage is encrypted, as well as Google Messages. Other platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, and ‘secret chats’ on Telegram are also encrypted too.
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