Several phone company networks have been implicated in a spying scheme driven by “affiliated actors” in the People’s Republic of China, federal authorities recently announced.
Customer call logs and private communications data were stolen and compromised as a result of the scheme, The Federal Bureau of Investigations and Cybersecurity (CISA) and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement.
while the ad initially claimed The attack was limited to people primarily involved in government or politics, officials said NBC news “PRC-affiliated actors” recently hacked AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies “to spy on customers.”
In a news call Tuesday, Dec. 3, FBI and CISA officials recommended using encrypted messaging apps for those who want to minimize the chances of others accessing their communications.
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Encrypted messages they are encoded messages that are unreadable by anyone without the correct decryption key.
Apps like WhatsApp and Signal use encrypted messages, including encrypted phone calls.
iMessages sent between iPhone users to other iPhone users are fully encrypted, and Google Messages sent between Android users are also fully encrypted.
However, messages sent from an Android to an iPhone or vice versa are not fully encrypted.
“Our suggestion, what we’ve told people internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether it’s texting or whether you have the ability to use encrypted voice communication. Until and everything if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it’s encrypted, it makes it impossible,” Jeff Greene, CISA’s executive deputy director for cybersecurity, told NBC.