Salt Typhoon Cyber Attack Strong Reminder to Use Encrypted Messages

The short answer is: yes — if you don’t take necessary precautions.

While the primary target appears to be political leaders, the joint report and guide advises major organizations and enterprises to strengthen their visibility and harden their network devices against exploitation and other malicious cyber actors:

“Although tailored to network defenders and engineers of communications infrastructure, this guide may also apply to organizations with on-premises enterprise equipment. The authoring agencies encourage telecommunications and other critical infrastructure organizations to apply the best practices in this guide.”

Financial services organizations can’t ignore this global cyberattack, especially as more business communications take place over smartphones, mobile apps and text messages.

Individual employees to do their part too, by only using approved tools (mobile devices and other communication or collaboration applications) for business-related communications.

Jeff Greene, executive assistant director of cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, strongly urged Americans to “use your encrypted communications where you have it,” adding that “we definitely need to do that, kind of look at what it means long-term, how we secure our networks.”

But how does this square for financial services firms that must be able to capture and retain business-related communications?