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- Hey, Signalgate is Still There
Hey, Signalgate is Still There
Even if the big media outlets aren't covering it
mister mix
May 05, 2025
New tech media outlet 404 has a scoop:
A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.
The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.
So these clowns started by not wanting to use internal communications, probably because they don’t want their chats recorded, so they used Signal. Signal has a decent reputation, but as soon as any off-the-shelf app is known to be used by the highest level of government, it’s going to be the target of hackers. Once someone told them that they had to archive their communications, they didn’t want to switch back to the secure alternatives, so they got this other app that has a huge security hole.
I scanned the front pages of the Post and Guardian and didn’t see any front page mention of this story, which broke last night. I guess this deviance has been normalized by the press in conjunction with the incompetents running the Trump Administration.
Whenever DOGE blathers on about “saving” a few bucks, this issue should be raised as an example of simple carelessness that will cost us a really huge amount of money — we’ll have to re-secure everything, investigate all the leaks, etc. I can’t even begin to estimate that cost, but it will be massive.
Not really related to this story, but the leak also exposed some crypto lobbyists counting votes for the crypto bill that is supposedly in trouble in the Senate because Democrats are backing away from the bill because (shock) Republicans didn’t incorporate some negotiated terms into the bill. The bill regulates so-called “stablecoin,” crypto currencies tied to the value of the dollar. Like every other form of crypto currency, stablecoins fail regularly. And of course, Trump has a stablecoin and is already being bribed by those using it:
May 1 (Reuters) - A stablecoin launched by Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto venture is being used by an Abu Dhabi investment firm for its $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance, one of World Liberty's co-founders said on Thursday.
It's the latest in a series of Trump family crypto-related ventures, including a "meme coin" launched in January, that have drawn criticism from government ethics experts and political opponents over potential conflicts of interest.
Democrats supporting this nonsense is more donor-driven stupidity, more evidence of how money corrupts, and more rot that needs to be cleaned out. Instead of talking about crypto, they should be hammering the Trump Administration on Signalgate. But there’s no money in that, is there?
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