It’s not often that a piece of FBI advice triggers a Snopes fact check. But the agency’s urgent message this month to Americans, often summarized as “stop texting,” surprised many consumers.
The warning from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) highlighted vulnerabilities in text messaging systems that millions of Americans use every day.
The U.S. believes hackers affiliated with China’s government, dubbed Salt Typhoon, are waging a “broad and significant cyber-espionage campaign” to infiltrate commercial telecoms and steal users’ data — and in isolated cases, to record phone calls, a senior FBI official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity said during a Dec. 3 briefing call.
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