FBI Warns About Text Messages Being Hacked 

United States: The FBI has already warned people in the U.S. who use iPhones and Android phones to be careful about their text messages. 

So, there has been a huge cyberattack, called Salt Typhoon, which may have allowed hackers from China to literally spy on people’s private messages and these hackers got into big companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies to steal information. 

The FBI and CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) advise people to avoid sending text messages at all as it is not very easy for hackers to intercept messages that are sent by WhatsApp and Signal. Both What’s App and Signals also enables users to do encrypted calls between each other through the internet. 

As reported by the Syracuse.com, messages that are sent via Apple iMessage service, which is colored blue when sent between iPhones, and Google Messages, which are green, sent between Android devices, are fully encrypted via the Signal protocol. 

Nevertheless, messaging between iPhone and Android, as well as the opposite, only partially encrypt messages. NBC says messages between different devices are encrypted only with Rich Communications Services (RCS), where in the US all are decrypted by Google. 

Another messaging app is Telegram, they also say they provide end to end encryption, but it is said they do not encrypt messages by default and have been criticized by cybersecurity professionals. 

“Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, particularly on text messaging if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communique. If an adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will be impossible,” said Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA to NBC. 

According to Yahoo! News, encryption is the technology used in scrambling message, where to anybody, it become invisible, but you can see or hear it only if you have the key. WhatsApp and Signal are messaging apps that encrypt conversations from one user with this code to another, and the developer of the apps cannot read the contents even if stolen and ordered to do so by a court.