U.S. officials are urging Americans to use encrypted apps to protect their communications after telecommunications companies were compromised during a recent hack from communist China that is the largest breach in history.
A senior FBI official, who asked not be identified, said during a call with reporters that “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 MFA (multi-factor authentication) for email, social media, and collaboration tool accounts.”
Jeff Greene, an official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), added: “Encryption is your friend, whether it is on text messaging or you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication.”
He added that the breach was so large in scale that it was “impossible” to know when officials would have a “full eviction” of Chinese hackers from U.S. systems.
The warning from U.S. law enforcement comes after Microsoft cybersecurity experts dubbed the cyberattack from the Chinese government “Salt Typhoon” with “Typhoon” denoting that the operation is Chinese and “Salt” indicating that it is a counterintelligence operation.
The New York Times reported that the Chinese are believed to have hacked systems used by the companies to comply with court-authorized surveillance wiretaps, including Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act collection, one of the secretive measures the U.S. has to uncover networks of terrorists and spies.
The Chinese hackers compromised the phones of numerous prominent individuals in politics and national security, including top elected leaders.
NBC News reported that the Chinese stole call records and were able to target specific individuals and listen in to live phone calls.
One of the concerns that officials had about the Chinese discovering who U.S. officials were communicating with was that it would give them a list of people to target in influence operations aimed at manipulating decision makers.
Chinese hackers outnumber all of the FBI’s cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1. They are estimated to have up to 600,000 people involved in their espionage operations.
