Daily Archives: 2025-05-05

Signal clone used by Trump official stops operations after report it was hacked

Posted on 2025-05-05 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: It's an absolute onion of incompetence. Doing high-net shit over commercial software on the public internet. Getting caught doing it by adding the most wrong people possible to your chats, and using your public phone numbers, and letting the media photograph the behavior. Picking the most secure option... but using a version hacked by an Israeli spyware vendor to allow retention, so you can pretend to comply with records acts. Getting hacked because said Israeli spyware vendor who appears to have hired a mediocre college student to do the modifications. It's honestly hard to imaging someone fucking up harder.

A messaging service used by former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has temporarily shut down while the company investigates an apparent hack. The messaging app is used to access and archive Signal messages but is not made by Signal itself.

404 Media reported yesterday that a hacker stole data "from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the US government to archive messages." 404 Media interviewed the hacker and reported that the data stolen "contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using [TeleMessage's] Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat."

TeleMessage is based in Israel and was acquired in February 2024 by Smarsh, a company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Smarsh provided a statement to Ars today saying it has temporarily shut down all TeleMessage services.

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