China Pwns U.S. Telecoms

Life in interesting times.

I had seen articles about this in passing, but I was busy. Having just taken the time to listen this morning … well … Throw Away Your Cell Phone is still the best advice I can give.

China got into *we’re not even sure what all* and this is going to be an ongoing issue. They will retain some access despite this being public and they’re going to use it to strike back at the Trump administration when the tariffs become active.

A rule to live by: if the stuff in the middle CAN see what you’re doing, it IS seeing what you’re doing, and that’s never in your best interest.

I can count the number of people who call me PSTN on the fingers of one hand, and even those are limited to Google Voice. I never let an actual cell phone number out into the wild any more, and I know it’s painful, but you should take similar steps. Cell phones can be geolocated, knowing your number plus some personal information sets you up for intrusion via SIM swapping, it’s simply took much of a well known attack surface for the 2020s.

There’s already a lot of writing on this in Tool Time and it looks like 2025 is going to be a steady diet of prevention and incident response for me. While that’s great for my pocketbook it’s a miserable situation for the country as a whole; people get stung for five or six figures every day, and that’s money that’s just gone beyond recall.