Avoiding Salt Typhoon
Remediating China's intrusion into our phone companies.
This is pretty amazing to me - FBI suggesting people start using Signal in order to protect themselves from Chinese intrusion into our phone companies. That goes double for anyone in government, or any commercial sector that has been targeted by China’s massive industrial espionage campaign.
So … all that stuff I’ve been saying about phone security since the day this Substack launched? The FBI is now in agreement with me.
All the usual prescriptions apply:
Get a new cellular phone number and keep it private.
Replace carrier number with Google Voice number.
Get off PSTN and starting using Signal.
Re-read Throw Away Your Cell Phone.
This is inconvenient AF. But less so than living in a prison cell, or dying in a drone strike. And that is where the world is headed, even here in the previously quite safe Fortress America.
Replace Your TP-Link Router:
You should read the article Possible TP-Link Ban Set for 2025: What It Means for Your Internet Connection. The summary is pretty simple.
“The Chinese-made routers have reportedly been shipped with security flaws linked to Chinese cyberattacks.”
The article says that, I would add some other issues to the list that they did not cover, things one could do with a subverted router.
They can serve as a VPN endpoint for bad actors that control them; your IP, their traffic.
Traffic observation would be limited by the devices cpu, memory, and bandwidth, but still possible.
If you’re getting email from a server belonging to the U.S. government or a defense contractor, that VPN access could facilitate subverting your systems.
VPN endpoint lets a bad actor geofence an area, then post social media content as if they live there, China certainly has something like Russia’s Meliorator botnet.
Conclusion:
When China gets tariffs, the ubiquitous Chinese industrial espionage might escalate to attacks, and even if they don’t, Iran and Russia will.
If you are not doing something to improve your security, those of us who are would like to thank you for being a soft target. Seriously, you don’t need to be secure, you just need to be more trouble than you are worth. If there are less wary victims available, unless you are a specific sort of problem (like me), they’ll just move on to greener pastures.
So that’s that. You’ve presumably got a little time off here at the end of the year, use some of it to make yourself a harder target.