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  Hey everyone, I'm Drex and . This is The Two Minute Drill, where I talk about three hot security stories twice a week. all part of the 229 Cyber and Risk Community here at This Week Health. The two minute drill is a mostly plain English, mostly non technical look at security and risk, so it's good for the whole team.

Share it as you see fit. The two minute drill today is brought to you by ORDR. You want to know everything about everything connected to your network, but you don't have the resources to manage what you're seeing? Bring ORDR to the chaos with ORDR Managed Services. Find out more at ORDR. net. Thanks for joining me today.

Here's some stuff you might want to know about. Okay. Today's episode is all about one problem, but there's a bunch of different stories from a bunch of different sources on it. And the story is one that I've talked about before too, Salt Typhoon. Chinese hackers now appear to be in at least eight US telecommunication carriers, and there seems to be no great way to get them out.

Those telecom firms and a couple of dozen other nations who are experiencing similar attacks are working together on the problem as it sprawls from one company to the next. The hackers have had access to private text and phone conversations for an unknown number of Americans, including senior officials and political officials and business leaders.

But again, the scope of the attack is still very much a mystery. And since Nobody's been able to get these thugs out of their networks and everything's connected to everything else. And apparently now we're understanding that this problem has been going on for a couple of years. I'm hoping this isn't one of those things where to get rid of the bedbugs we have to burn the whole house down.

In the words of Fast Company writer Sam Becker, if you've ever wondered what it's like to be sucked into the plot of a Tom Clancy novel, millions of Americans are getting a taste of it this week. Now look, if you're not a high profile political operative, you may not feel very concerned, but you know. Be paranoid.

If you knew that every phone call and every text message and every photo you send could be public tomorrow, what would you do to protect yourself? Well, for organizations, CISA has released some new security guidelines for larger companies and telecom companies, but for individuals, do your software updates and patches and use encrypted end to end messaging software like Signal.

You can find that in the App Store. By the way, I don't have any business arrangements with Signal, so I don't get any money by recommending it, but I do use it and a lot of security people prefer it because of the encryption part of the messaging. Also good to know is that if you're texting with someone and you're both on iPhones, your messages are encrypted.

Same with Google Messages. Between Google users, but when you cross from one to the other, Unencrypted. Who knows when and if this ever gets resolved. It's a good time to do the right thing regardless when it comes to encryption. This is obviously a developing story and I'll keep you posted. The two minute drill is brought to you by order.

You know you can depend on order to give you visibility into everything on your network, but now you can also depend on order managed services to help you stay on top of all those things in real time. all the time. Check out order. net slash healthcare. That's O R D R dot net slash healthcare for details.

That's it for today's two minute drill. Thanks for being here. Stay a little paranoid. I'll see you around campus.