U.S. Offi­cials Urge Amer­i­cans To Use Encrypt­ed Apps After Chi­nese Hack

U.S. offi­cials are urg­ing Amer­i­cans to use encrypt­ed apps to pro­tect their com­mu­ni­ca­tions after telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies were com­prised 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.

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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.

“China’s hack­ing pro­gram is larg­er than that of every oth­er major nation, com­bined,” said FBI Direc­tor Christo­pher Wray.

Sen. Mar­co Rubio (R‑FL), who was nom­i­nat­ed to serve as Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s Sec­re­tary of State, said last month that the hack was the largest breach he’s ever seen.