Hello and welcome to the Thursday, December 5, 2020, edition of the Sansonet Stormsandest.

My name is Johannes Ulrich.

I'm recording from Tampa, Florida.

In Diaries today, we got one of our undergradian interns.

Do a quick write-up about the need for data analysis, certainly something

that we are trying to drive home by exposing some of the interns to a little bit larger

amounts of data.

But in general, this is certainly a lesson that's important to anybody working in a sock

or something like this.

It's easy to get flooded by data.

So figuring out how to analyze the data and extracting the records that matter and also get a feel for the big picture is certainly important.

And while you probably have heard about the Walt Typhoon attack, this was a nation-state attack

that affected several telecommunication providers in the US that allowed attackers to record

traffic like voice calls and messages being sent via these telecommunication providers.

The FBI and apparently SISA is now advising that people should stop using unencrypted

messaging systems like, for example, SMS.

I've only seen quotes in the press where senior officials from these agencies were quoted

as stating this,

haven't seen any sort of press release on either the FBI or SISA website.

What's sort of interesting about this is that in part the way these bad actors then got access to the customer messaging

was some of the interfaces that network providers put in place in order to allow for court-ordered wiretaps.

And, well, organizations like the FBI, for example, have in the past argued against the use of end-to-end encryption because they just prevent this kind of access.

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