US government tells officials, politicians to ditch regular calls and texts
Source: Reuters
December 18, 2024 1:52 PM EST Updated 7 hours ago
WASHINGTON, Dec 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. government is urging senior government officials and politicians to ditch phone calls and text messages following intrusions at major American telecommunications companies blamed on Chinese hackers. Right now.
In written guidance released on Wednesday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said "individuals who are in senior government or senior political positions" should "immediately review and apply" a series of best practices around the use of mobile devices. The first recommendation: "Use only end-to-end encrypted communications."
End-to-end encryption - a data protection technique which aims to make data unreadable by anyone except its sender and its recipient - is baked into various chat apps, including Meta Platforms' (META.O) WhatsApp, Apple's (AAPL.O) iMessage, and the privacy-focused app Signal. Corporate offerings which allow end-to-end encryption also include Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab Teams and Zoom Communications' (ZM.O) online meetings.
Neither regular phone calls nor text messages are end-to-end encrypted, which means they can be monitored, either by the telephone companies, law enforcement, or - potentially - hackers who've broken into the phone companies' infrastructure.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-cyber-watchdog-tells-senior-officials-immediately-adopt-end-to-end-encryption-2024-12-18/
Link to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) GUIDANCE (PDF) - https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mobile-communications-best-practices.pdf
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but when the government started introducing mobile devices.
I remember my own agency initially deploying Blackberries (I had 2 over those years before I retired), but once the iPhones and iPads came out, people were demanding to be able to use those, and that opened up a whole other can of worms.
Hell, I still remember when I first started at my agency when each lab group (and other office group) had only ONE wired-into-the-wall black rotary phone per supervisory group (no phone on everyone's desk). Took a decade after that before they finally started wiring the place to allow a phone on every desk. 
