Emails & Texts Protection – Text Personal Info

Sophisticated hackers can eavesdrop on your texts

Don’t send important personal information in text messages.

For many of us who have spent years leaving and listening to voice-mail messages, texting is either a godsend or an irritation. Texting is a more efficient way to communicate as it’s simple and relatively free of problems. With the cell phone number of family, friends or colleagues, one can send and receive text messages quickly and easily. Both sender and receiver have the convenient option of reading/not reading the contents immediately or later.

Most of us use the out-of-box texting services native to our smartphones. For Apple-to-Apple texting, the iMessage protocol is used and is encrypted. All other combinations use the SMS protocol, which isn’t encrypted, and, hence, insecure.

Many texting users around the world rely on third party apps for communication:
• Facebook’s multi-platform WhatsApp supports worldwide texting and voice calling, It is used by over 1.5 billion people and is end-to-end encrypted with the Signal protocol.
• Signal, the app, is a solid, multiplatform choice as it uses an open protocol and encrypts both texts and voice calls. Moreover, it gathers minimal metadata about each text and allows message deletion for all recipients, implying better security and privacy.

To be safe, just don’t send social security numbers, or other personal information, in text messages.

FOR FURTHER READING:
CyberGuardian: a SecureTheVillage Guide for Residents is available on Amazon.
A complete Security Checklist is available: https://www.nerdsiview.com/security-checklist-2/
References for Village Residents are available at SECURE THE VILLAGE: https://securethevillage.org/residents

 © Alan Steven Krantz 2021