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.
XMPP is terrible for the average user, its encryption (OMEMO) in most clients is not the latest version of it (making it weak) and can be turned off, a bad thing for an encrypted messenger. Plus verification requires comparing a string of numbers in most cases, something most users do not want to do or would find it difficult to accurately.
SimpleX Chat has not proven itself to be legal request resistant yet (they seem not to have any information on requests recieved) and does not have many audits. Plus it is very barebones and has bad UX. Until they fix these things it will not be attractive to most typical folks.
Yes, I know of the OMEMO issues. Most users would probably find that too difficult (although it isn’t imo). It’s very hard to convince people of more secure, non-mainstream tools, unfortunately.
I believe that had improved recently, especially due to funding from the original creator of Twitter and Bluesky.
Though in general yes, apps that are about ‘extreme’ privacy tend to be as they like to avoid the big corporate tech servers for notifications etc whenever possible and probably other things too meaning they have to use more power in order to get the same results as the ones that do use them.
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XMPP maybe?
I also tink SimpleX Chat is a good alternative.
I wouldn’t recommend Signal (only the client is open source, the server is from Amazon, and you have to provide your phone number).
XMPP is terrible for the average user, its encryption (OMEMO) in most clients is not the latest version of it (making it weak) and can be turned off, a bad thing for an encrypted messenger. Plus verification requires comparing a string of numbers in most cases, something most users do not want to do or would find it difficult to accurately.
SimpleX Chat has not proven itself to be legal request resistant yet (they seem not to have any information on requests recieved) and does not have many audits. Plus it is very barebones and has bad UX. Until they fix these things it will not be attractive to most typical folks.
Yes, I know of the OMEMO issues. Most users would probably find that too difficult (although it isn’t imo). It’s very hard to convince people of more secure, non-mainstream tools, unfortunately.
And simplex is battery hell
I believe that had improved recently, especially due to funding from the original creator of Twitter and Bluesky.
Though in general yes, apps that are about ‘extreme’ privacy tend to be as they like to avoid the big corporate tech servers for notifications etc whenever possible and probably other things too meaning they have to use more power in order to get the same results as the ones that do use them.