14 DAY TRIAL // More and more public servants in Shanghai have chosen to dump their stylish iPhone and Samsung phone devices for a model that includes CDMA-based encryption capabilities offered by China Telecom.
The decision of the government officials has been taken in the wake of more and more reports about the iPhone incorporating backdoors that allowed surveillance.
According to Shanghai Morning Post, the public servants have chosen a domestic product from companies such as Coolpad, Huawei and Hisense as a more security-aware replacement.
China Telecom is the only carrier in the country that offers encryption mobile services to its users.
"Many civil servants have switched from iPhones or Samsung models to encrypted models made domestically," a government employee was quoted by the publication as saying
What the public servants fear is the risk of someone stealing details touching on government policies by compromising the device, offering threat actors the possibility to eavesdrop on phone calls and to access files available on the storage unit.
The recent revelations about the iPhone integrating backdoors allowing exfiltation of information from the device, separate from the encrypted backup.
The components, made public by data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski, can extract details relating to the address book, photos, voicemail, audio data, keystrokes, clipboard details, accounts (Twitter, iCloud, Facebook, etc.) configured on the device, as well as GPS logs.
Apple denied that the services capable of opening the content of iOS devices to third-party were surveillance mechanisms and said that they had a diagnostic purpose.