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President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz has already been ousted for using a bottom-shelf Signal clone for official messaging — but the fallout from that debacle is still getting worse and worse.
As Reuters reports, a hacker who accessed information from TeleMessage, an Israeli messaging app that was sold to the government to archive messages from Signal and other services, obtained data from way more Trump officials than previously thought.
It’s been an especially tough year for Waltz. After being caught accidentally adding Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic‘s editor-in-chief, to a Signal group chat about Yemeni bombing plans, the Trump adviser was photographed using TeleMessage’s Signal clone during a Cabinet meeting just before news broke that it had been hacked. Though Waltz was ultimately fired , the hits have continued in his absence.
With the help of the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which publishes hacked information of interest to the public, Reuters found more than 60 government officials whose information had been accessed from TeleMessage.
Those officials range from staffers with the State Department and the White House to disaster responders and Secret Service members, and although the messages the British wire reviewed were often fragmentary, its reporters were still able to see those federal employees’ phone numbers.
Outsiders are also corroborating. People outside the government, whose numbers were in the breached message cache, including one person who’d been applying for disaster aid and another from a financial service company, confirmed to Reuters that they had indeed been messaging with Trump administration officials.
The White House, to its end, said in a statement that it was “aware of the cyber security incident” but didn’t offer any additional details.
As Wired reported when the TeleMessage photo was first published, it appears that the app’s archiving capabilities essentially nullified any security promises from the app, which was recently purchased by an Oregon-based company called Smarsh.
The person who hacked the government’s Telemessage server told Wired in a followup story that breaching the app “wasn’t much effort at all,” and that it only took them about “15 or 20 minutes.”
As that hacker explained, an issue with the the app’s “hashing,” which is supposed to obfuscate passwords, accidentally made it easy to figure them out.
Once they were in, the hacker was presented with a file literally titled “heapdump” that included the login credentials of people who used the app — and because is archiving effectively un-encrypted the messages sent, they partially accessed those too.
Though the extent of this breach and other details about the scandal remain unclear, it’s abundantly obvious that the Trump administration has a security problem so bad that it makes Hillary Clinton’s private email server look like Fort Knox.
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