In the wake of SignalGate, a knockoff version of Signal used by a high-ranking member of the Trump administration was hacked. Today on Uncanny Valley, we discuss the platforms used for government communications.

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When former national security adviser Mike Waltz had a picture taken of him last week, he didn’t expect for the whole world to see that he was using TeleMessage, a messaging app similar to Signal. Now the app has been hacked, with portions of data linked to government entities like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and companies like Coinbase. Today on the show, we’re joined by WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman to discuss what this incident tells us about the growing vulnerabilities in government communications.

Articles mentioned in this episode:  
**Mike Waltz Has Somehow Gotten Even Worse at Using Signal**, by Lily Hay Newman  
**The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked** , by Joseph Cox and Micah Lee  
**The Signal Clone Mike Waltz Was Caught Using Has Direct Access to User Chats**, by Lily Hay Newman

You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Lily Hay Newman on Bluesky at @lhn. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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**Transcript**

_Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors._

**Zoë Schiffer:** Hi, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to take the chance to remind you that we want to hear from you. If you have tech-related questions that have been on your mind or a topic that you wish we'd cover, write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. And if you listen to and enjoy the show, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. It really honestly makes a difference. Welcome to WIRED's _Uncanny Valley_. I'm WIRED's director of business and industry, Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, the hacking scandal surrounding TeleMessage, the knockoff version of Signal, which is used by at least one high-ranking member of the Trump administration. The app has temporarily suspended its services while it investigates the incident. We're going to talk about how former national security adviser Mike Waltz was seen last week using the app in a cabinet meeting and what this latest incident tells us about the growing vulnerabilities in government communication. I'm joined by Lily Hay Newman, senior writer at WIRED. Lily, welcome to the show.

**Lily Hay Newman:** It's a pleasure to be here.

**Zoë Schiffer:** What exactly is TeleMessage?

**Lily Hay Newman:** Yeah. So TeleMessage is a company that's been around since the late ’90s. It was founded in Israel, and it creates apps that are sort of mirror images or clones of existing communication apps, and then adds in an archiving feature. So this is especially perhaps wanted for apps that are securing communications, such that it's difficult to retain copies of the messages. So if you need copies for compliance or you need a record, the idea is that these services are giving the same functionality as apps you know, like WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal, but with the addition of these archiving features.

**Zoë Schiffer:** And that's important, obviously, for people who work in government because, technically, members of the press and other people are supposed to be allowed to access a lot of the communications that aren't classified by submitting Freedom of Information Act requests. And you can't do that if the messages are disappearing.

**Lily Hay Newman:** Correct. There are record retention laws in the US and other countries for transparency and information requests, as you said. But historically, the way governments and other institutions have complied with that is by using communication platforms that are built for the purpose of government communications, tailor-built to be in compliance in a number of ways. So all of this is coming up because now the Trump administration in recent months has been sort of departing from the standard ways that officials in the US have communicated to use consumer platforms, particularly the secure messaging platform Signal, to talk to each other, but doing so in a very ad hoc consumer way like in the same way that you and I would set up a Signal conversation. That's what they've been doing, and that's where you get into this whole question of how do you comply with records requirements. How do you comply with safety requirements when you're just kind of using off-the-shelf tech in a regular way? And so that's where TeleMessage comes in.

**Zoë Schiffer:** Well, it seems like one of the people, as we mentioned earlier, who was using TeleMessage was Mike Waltz, the now former national security adviser, who at this point is best known for starting that infamous Signal group chat a few weeks back that accidentally added a senior member of The Atlantic Newsroom. How did we find out that he was using TeleMessage in the first place?

**Lily Hay Newman:** So his screen, the screen of his phone, was sort of inadvertently captured in a photo of a cabinet meeting, a Reuters photo, that Mike Waltz was participating in, was sitting at the table with Trump and a number of officials. The photo is a bit funny because it seems like he thinks no one can see him using his phone, or he is kind of checking his phone. I mean, we've all been there, looking under the conference table at our phone. But additionally, his screen shows what appears to be Signal. So we're really going, zooming in deep into this photo, right. We're looking over his shoulder at his phone. Now we're seeing this notification. And then in the notification, instead of the normal words that would be there, people noticed that the Signal … where it would normally say Signal, was being referred to as TM Signal. And that's how people realized that, actually, he was using this other app called TeleMessage.

**Zoë Schiffer:** Got it. Yeah. Nothing makes me love reporters more than the absolute psychotic behavior of zooming in on a tiny little phone screen to be like, “What exactly is going on here?” But kudos to 404 Media, because I think they were the first ones to point that out. You wrote in a recent WIRED article that Mike Waltz has inexplicably gotten even worse at using Signal. So, I guess what did you mean by that? How is he getting worse at using this end-to-end encrypted app?

**Lily Hay Newman:** This whole revelation about his use of TM Signal is building on this previous situation called Signal Gate. Mike Waltz was the person who inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the top editor of The Atlantic, to the chat. And so already Mike Waltz was not having a great track record, and then disappearing messages were on the whole time. And so, one of the many criticisms was that this was not in compliance with government record-retention laws. So we don't know this, but presumably then he started using TM Signal as a solution to that aspect of the issues raised. But I just want to be clear. We don't know. It could be that they were already using it, or he was already using TM Signal at the time. I'm not sure. But one might suspect that hearing some of this criticism, he was like, “OK, let me find a solution that does retain records and does have an archiving feature.” And that's where TeleMessage would come in.

**Zoë Schiffer:** So the national security advisoer sets up this group chat, presumably not in compliance, then switches to one that looks like it might be in compliance, and then that version is promptly hacked. Do we know at this point who is behind the hacking?

**Lily Hay Newman:** More and more is coming out about potential hacks of TeleMessage or sort of ability to intercept messages and see messages in memory. First, 404 Media and Micah Lee published a piece with an unnamed hacker providing evidence that they could breach TeleMessage. And then, on Monday, NBC News published an additional report with an additional unnamed hacker. So clearly there's a lot of insecurity here. And the criticism of TM Signal from this company, TeleMessage, is that it claims to have all the same security features as real Signal and to sort of preserve that, and just add on this archiving feature. But, definitionally, adding in the archiving feature breaks Signal security. The way signal is designed and other end-to-end encrypted apps like WhatsApp, when you add in this other party, it's virtually impossible that the security guarantees could be preserved. And then, on top of that, it seems like from source code review that's starting to come out, and research that's starting to happen, and analysis into TM Signal, that actually it's just not constructed in a very secure way at all. So, just a lot of layers to get to the point, which is that this was a wildly insecure app for Mike Waltz to be using, sitting at a table with the top cabinet members and the president of the United States. It's wild.

**Zoë Schiffer:** We're going to get into what exactly was accessed in this hack. But before we do that, we're going to take a short break.

\[_break_\]

**Zoë Schiffer:** We are back. So let's get into what exactly was accessed when it looks like multiple hackers were able to break into TM Signal, which was being used by at least one member of the Trump administration.

**Lily Hay Newman:** So far, these researchers, what they've shown is that some messages, sometimes at least, are being sent to the archiving server in plain text, meaning they are readable. That's precisely what a platform like genuine Signal is trying to avoid. And so that's what's happening. So these were sort of fragments or pieces or whole messages, but not whole conversations, things like that, so far. One thing that 404 Media reported on from these leaks was evidence that US Customs and Border Patrol agents have been using TM Signal. It's not totally clear what's going on with this. WIRED reached out to CBP. We've been trying to get clarification on what this leaked data means. There seem to be confirmed CBP phone numbers associated with these accounts that came out of this breach. CBP has told WIRED just that they're looking into it. But that's an example that is really concerning, it would potentially show that this app is in wider use across other agencies in the US government.

**Zoë Schiffer:** Is there a national security concern with the fact that this app was developed in Israel, regardless of the fact that it was acquired by a US company recently?

**Lily Hay Newman:** The thing is, even without getting into any specific geopolitics, the point of the protocols that exist for the US government to use its own purpose-built communication platforms is that any and all foreign governments conduct espionage. The US does it. Everyone does it. So, for your most sacred and sensitive national communication, you want to do that on a platform that you completely control, that you have built and vetted yourself, and just all parameters are controlled by you. You don't want to involve any other parties. So Israeli espionage groups are known for being very aggressive, very innovative, very cunning. So, for that reason, particularly, perhaps it's a concern that TeleMessage was founded in the country and has those ties. But just in general, regardless of what country it is, I think it's important conceptually to understand that it doesn't make sense to use the app in this way.

**Zoë Schiffer:** After this reporting came out, TeleMessage has paused or stopped its services. What's the status of the company right now?

**Lily Hay Newman:** Right. So clearly, they have concerns, and their parent company, Smarsh, has concerns about these findings as well. They say that they are investigating a potential breach and have employed a third-party firm to help them with that. And they've taken down all the content from the TeleMessage website and paused TeleMessage operations, essentially. So they say it's a pause and pending the investigation, but a pretty big reaction here to these findings.

**Zoë Schiffer:** That's a good place to end it. When we come back, we'll share our recommendations for what to check out on WIRED.com this week. Welcome back to _Uncanny Valley_. I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's director of business and industry. I'm joined today by WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman. Before we take off, Lily, tell our listeners what they absolutely have to read on WIRED this week.

**Lily Hay Newman:** I'm just fascinated by this story by our colleague Caroline Haskins. US border agents are asking for help taking photos of everyone entering the country by car. And this is, we're just continuing our CBP discussions for today. CBP has apparently released a request for information seeking pitches, essentially for companies to help them do vehicle surveillance at the border and face recognition technology to see specifically who is in cars, not just the front seat. And I think it's really important for all of us to be aware of the extensive and expansive surveillance dragnet at the US border and all different types of US border crossings. The southern border of the US has long been known as sort of like a forefront of surveillance technology. And so it's dark, but interesting to hear that CBP feels like they don't yet have what they need to do this type of analysis and face recognition in cars, but that they want it, and they're trying to expand the analysis they can do on who is in every car.

**Zoë Schiffer:** Right. And it'll be interesting to see which company gets this contract. OK. Well, I wanted to flag a piece that we published yesterday by Paresh Dave and Kylie Robison. It's about OpenAI announcing that it is not, in fact, going to restructure its company to make the nonprofit arm not in control. In other words, the nonprofit arm is going to remain in control of the company. And this is a reversal of a prior announcement where it said it was going to become a public benefit corporation, likely to make fundraising easier. But after the plan was announced, the company got a ton of pushback from a variety of civic organizations and also Elon Musk, who was involved in the founding of the company before an acrimonious split in 2018. These groups don't usually agree on a lot, but they agreed on this, that becoming a for-profit company was in violation of OpenAI's founding mission. So we have a lot of good reporting on how people are taking this news and what it means for the future of the company. That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of _Uncanny Valley_, which is about Trump's meme coin saga and the conflict of interest that come with it. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Condé Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

The Trump Administration Sure Is Having Trouble Keeping Its Comms Private

A new analysis of TM Signal’s source code appears to show that the app sends users’ message logs in plaintext. At least one top Trump administration official used the app.

The communication app TeleMessage Signal, used by at least one top Trump administration official to archive messages, has already reportedly suffered breaches that illustrate concerning security flaws and resulted in its parent company imposing a service pause this week pending investigation. Now, according to detailed new findings from the journalist and security researcher Micah Lee, TM Signal's archiving feature appears to fundamentally undermine Signal's flagship security guarantees, sending messages between the app and a user's message archive without end-to-end encryption, thus making users' communications accessible to TeleMessage.

Lee conducted a detailed analysis of TM Signal's Android source code to assess the app's design and security. In collaboration with 404 Media, he had previously reported on a hack of TM Signal over the weekend, which revealed some user messages and other data—a clear sign that at least some data was being sent unencrypted, or as plaintext, at least some of the time within the service. This alone would seem to contradict TeleMessage's marketing claims that TM Signal offers “End-to-End encryption from the mobile phone through to the corporate archive.” But Lee says that his latest findings show that TM Signal is not end-to-end encrypted and that the company could access the contents of users' chats.

“The fact that there are plaintext logs confirms my hypothesis,” Lee tells WIRED. “The fact that the archive server was so trivial for someone to hack, and that TM Signal had such an incredible lack of basic security, that was worse than I expected.”

TeleMessage is an Israeli company that completed its acquisition last year by the US-based digital communications archiving company Smarsh. TeleMessage is a federal contractor, but the consumer apps it offers are not approved for use under the US government's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP.

Smarsh did not return WIRED's requests for comment about Lee's findings. The company said on Monday, “TeleMessage is investigating a potential security incident. Upon detection, we acted quickly to contain it and engaged an external cybersecurity firm to support our investigation.”

Lee's findings are likely significant for all TeleMessage users but have particular significance given that TM Signal was used by President Donald Trump's now-former national security adviser Mike Waltz. He was photographed last week using the service during a cabinet meeting, and the photo appeared to show that he was communicating with other high-ranking officials, including Vice President JD Vance, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and what appears to be US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. TM Signal is compatible with Signal and would expose messages sent in a chat with someone using TM Signal, whether all participants are using it or some are using the genuine Signal app.

Lee found that TM Signal is designed to save Signal communication data in a local database on a user's device and then send this to an archive server for long-term retention. The messages, he says, are sent directly to the archive server, seemingly as plaintext chat logs in the cases examined by Lee. Conducting the analysis, he says, “confirmed the archive server has access to plaintext chat logs.”

Data taken from the TeleMessage archive server in the hack included chat logs, usernames and plaintext passwords, and even private encryption keys.

In a letter on Tuesday, US senator Ron Wyden called for the Department of Justice to investigate TeleMessage, alleging that it is “a serious threat to US national security.”

“The government agencies that have adopted TeleMessage Archiver have chosen the worst possible option,” Wyden wrote. “They have given their users something that looks and feels like Signal, the most widely trusted secure communications app. But instead, senior government officials have been provided with a shoddy Signal knockoff that poses a number of serious security and counterintelligence threats. The security threat posed by TeleMessage Archiver is not theoretical.”

The Signal Clone Mike Waltz Was Caught Using Has Direct Access to User Chats

Now the US director of national intelligence, Gabbard failed to follow basic cybersecurity practices on several of her personal accounts, leaked records reviewed by WIRED reveal.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years, according to leaked records reviewed by WIRED. Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a journalist, the revelation raises further questions about the security practices of the US spy chief.

WIRED reviewed Gabbard's passwords using databases of material leaked online created by the open-source intelligence firms District 4 Labs and Constella Intelligence. Gabbard served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, during which time she sat on the Armed Services Committee, its Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, and the Foreign Affairs Committee, giving her access to sensitive information. Material from breaches shows that during a portion of this period, she used the same password across multiple email addresses and online accounts, in contravention of well-established best practices for online security. (There is no indication that she used the password on government accounts.)

Two collections of breached records published in 2017 (but breached at some previous unknown date), known as “combolists,” reveal a password that was used for an email account associated with her personal website; that same password, according to a combolist published in 2019, was used with her Gmail account. That same password was used, according to records dating to 2012, for Dropbox and LinkedIn accounts associated with the email address tied to her personal website. According to records dating to 2018 breaches, she also used it on a MyFitnessPal account associated with a me.com email address and an account at HauteLook, a now-defunct ecommerce site then owned by Nordstrom.

Records of these breaches have been available online for years and are accessible in commercial databases.

The password associated with all of the accounts in question includes the word “shraddha,” which appears to have personal significance to Gabbard: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had been initiated into the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement into which she was reportedly born and which former members have accused of being a cult. Several former adherents told The Journal that they believe Gabbard received the name “Shraddha Dasi” when she was allegedly received into the group. Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, responded to questions from The Journal at the time by posting them on X and accusing the news media of publicizing “Hinduphobic smears and other lies.”

“The data breaches you’re referring to occurred almost 10 years ago, and the passwords have changed multiple times since,” wrote Olivia Coleman, a Gabbard spokesperson, in response to questions from WIRED. “As our deputy chief of staff has already made clear on a number of occasions, the DNI has never and doesn’t have affiliation with that organization. Attempting to smear the DNI as being in a cult is bigoted behavior.“

“Your bigoted lies and smears of a cabinet member and your story fomenting hinduphobia is noted,” wrote Henning in response to a follow-up question about the probability of Gabbard’s password containing the same name she was reportedly received into Science of Identity Foundation with, given her denials that she has ever been affiliated with the group. “This was well litigated during her confirmation hearing so congrats on being about 6 months late to this story. Great job.”

Science of Identity did not respond to a request for comment.

Security experts advise people to never use the same password on different accounts precisely because people often do so. If a password for one account is revealed in a breach, hackers will often attempt to use it to access other accounts controlled by the same person. Reusing passwords is especially dangerous with email, because a compromised email account can be used to reset credentials for other accounts or systems.

The Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, the top US government authority on digital security, advises members of the public to use a password manager to generate a different password of at least 16 characters, consisting of random strings of mixed-case numbers, letters, and symbols or at least four unrelated words, for every account they use.

As director of national intelligence, Gabbard oversees the 18 organizations comprising the US intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, and their budget of roughly $100 billion. By statute, she is the principal adviser to the president and the National Security Council on intelligence matters relating to national security, and so is charged with maintaining the security of much of the most sensitive information in the government. The Democratic National Committee, citing a 2019 statement that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was “not the enemy of the United States,” news reports on the support she has enjoyed from Russian state media, and her ties to “conspiracy theorists,” has characterized Gabbard as a “direct threat to our national security.”

Gabbard addressed these criticisms during her Senate confirmation hearings in January.

“Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the constitution of the United States, accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters,” she said. “The fact is, what truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet.”

Tulsi Gabbard Reused the Same Weak Password on Multiple Accounts for Years

Customs and Border Protection has called for tech companies to pitch real-time face recognition technology that can capture everyone in a vehicle—not just those in the front seats.

United States Customs and Border Protection is asking tech companies to send pitches for a real-time face recognition tool that would take photos of every single person in a vehicle at a border crossing, including anyone in the back seats, and match them to travel documents, according to a document posted in a federal register last week.

The request for information, or RIF, says that CBP already has a face recognition tool that takes a picture of a person at a port of entry and compares it to travel or identity documents that someone gives to a border officer, as well as other photos from those documents already “in government holdings.”

“Biometrically confirmed entries into the United States are added to the traveler’s crossing record,” the document says.

An agency under the Department of Homeland Security, CBP says that its face recognition tool “is currently operating in the air, sea, and land pedestrian environments.” The agency’s goal is to bring it to “the land vehicle environment.” According to a page on CBP’s website updated last week, the agency is currently “testing” how to do so. The RIF says that these tests demonstrate that while this face recognition tool has “improved,” it isn’t always able to get photos of every vehicle passenger, especially if they’re in the second or third row.

“Human behavior, multiple passenger vehicle rows, and environmental obstacles all present challenges unique to the vehicle environment,” the document says. CBP says it wants a private vendor to provide it with a tool that would “augment the passenger images” and “capture 100% of vehicle passengers.”

Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, received a document from CBP via public record request that reveals the results of a 152-day test the agency conducted on its port of entry face recognition system from late 2021 to early 2022. The document Maass obtained was first reported by The Intercept.

Maass said that what stood out to him were the error rates. Cameras at the Anzalduas border crossing at Mexico’s border with McAllen, Texas, captured photos of everyone in the car just 76 percent of the time, and of those people, just 81 percent met the “validation requirements” for matching their face with their identification documents.

The current iteration of the system matches a person’s photo to their travel documents in what’s known as one-to-one face recognition. The primary risk here, Maass says, is the system failing to recognize that someone matches their own documents. This differs from one-to-many face recognition, which police may use to identify a suspect based on a surveillance photo, where the primary risk is someone getting a false positive match and being falsely identified as a suspect.

Maass says it’s unclear whether CBP’s error rates primarily have to do with the cameras or the matching system itself. “We don't know what racial disparities, gender disparities, etc, come up with these systems,” he says.

As reported by The Intercept in 2024, the DHS's Science and Technology Directorate issued a request for information last August that’s similar to the one that CBP posted last week. However, the DHS document currently appears to be unavailable.

Maass adds that it’s important to remember that CBP’s push to widen and improve its surveillance isn’t unique to the current Trump administration.

“CBP surveillance strategy carries over from administration to administration—it always falls short, it always has vendor issues and contracting issues and waste issues and abuse issues,” Maass says. “What changes is often the rhetoric and the theater around it.”

DHS noted in a 2024 report that CBP has historically struggled to get “biographic and biometric” data from people leaving the country, particularly if they leave over land. This means it’s hard for it to track people self-deporting from the country, which is something the administration is encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to do. CBP’s recent request for information only mentions inbound vehicles, not outbound vehicles, meaning it’s currently not set up to use face recognition to track self-deporations.

CBP did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

CBP’s request for information comes less than three weeks after 404 Media revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is paying the software company Palantir $30 million to build a platform that would allow the agency to perform “complete target analysis of known populations.” According to a contract justification published a few days later, the platform, called ImmigrationOS, would give ICE “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the US, with the goal of having accurate numbers on how many people are doing so. However, ICE did not specify where it would get the data to power ImmigrationOS.

In the ICE document that justifies paying Palantir for ImmigrationOS, the agency does not specify where Palantir would get the data to power the tool. However, it does note that Palantir could create ImmigrationOS by configuring the case management system that the company has provided to ICE since 2014. This case management system integrates all of the information ICE may have about a person from investigative records or government databases, according to a government privacy assessment published in 2016.

It’s unclear if the system may have integrated new data sources over the past decade. But at the time of the assessment, the system stored information about someone’s physical attributes—like hair and eye color, height and weight, and any scars or tattoos—as well as any “location-related data” from “covert tracking devices,” and any data from license plate readers, which can provide a detailed history on where a person goes in their vehicle and when.

US Border Agents Are Asking for Help Taking Photos of Everyone Entering the Country by Car

The communications app TeleMessage, which was spotted on former US national security adviser Mike Waltz's phone, has suspended “all services” as it investigates reports of at least one breach.

The messaging app used by at least one top Trump administration official has suspended its services following reports of hackers stealing data from the app. Smarsh, TeleMessage’s parent company, says it is now investigating the incident.

“TeleMessage is investigating a potential security incident. Upon detection, we acted quickly to contain it and engaged an external cybersecurity firm to support our investigation,” a Smarsh spokesperson told WIRED in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, all TeleMessage services have been temporarily suspended. All other Smarsh products and services remain fully operational.”

President Donald Trump's now-former national security adviser Mike Waltz was captured by a Reuters photographer last week using an unauthorized version of the secure communication app Signal—known as TeleMessage Signal or TM Signal—which allows users to archive their communications. Photos of Waltz using the app appear to show that he was communicating with other high-ranking officials, including Vice President JD Vance, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Experts told WIRED on Friday that, by definition, TM Signal's archiving feature undermined the end-to-end encryption that makes the actual Signal communication app secure and private. 404 Media and independent journalist Micah Lee reported on Sunday that the app had been breached by a hacker. NBC News reported on Monday that it had reviewed evidence of an additional breach.

TeleMessage was founded in Israel in 1999 and was acquired last year by the US-based digital communications archiving company Smarsh. TeleMessage makes apparently unauthorized versions of popular communications apps that include archiving features for institutional compliance. But the company claims that its look-alikes have the same digital defenses as their legitimate counterparts, potentially giving users a false sense of security.

Waltz's app usage came under intense scrutiny last month after he appeared to have added the editor in chief of The Atlantic to a Signal group chat in which Trump administration officials discussed plans for a military operation. Dubbed SignalGate, the scandal ultimately preceded Waltz's ouster as national security adviser. President Trump said last week that he plans to nominate him to be ambassador to the United Nations.

TeleMessage apps are not approved for use under the US government's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, and yet they seem to be proliferating. Leaked data reportedly from TM Signal indicates that multiple US Customs and Border Protection agents may be using the Signal look-alike. When asked about the breach and whether CBP officers use TM Signal, the agency told WIRED, “We're looking into this.”

After a number of reports by Lee and 404 Media over the weekend, TeleMessage removed all content from its website on Saturday and took down its archiving service on Sunday.

“We are committed to transparency and will share updates as we are able,” the Smarsh statement adds. “We thank our customers and partners for their trust and patience during this time.”

Since the revelation last week that Waltz appeared to be using TM Signal, experts have feared that information shared on the app could jeopardize US national security.

Signal Clone Used by Mike Waltz Pauses Service After Reports It Got Hacked

The open source software easyjson is used by the US government and American companies. But its ties to Russia’s VK, whose CEO has been sanctioned, have researchers sounding the alarm.

Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine more than three years ago, Russian technology companies and executives have been widely sanctioned for supporting the Kremlin. That includes Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides and the CEO of VK Group, which runs VK, Russia’s Facebook equivalent that has increasingly shifted towards the regime’s repressive positioning.

Now cybersecurity researchers are warning that a widely used piece of open source code—which is linked to Kiriyenko’s company and managed by Russian developers—may pose a “persistent” national security risk to the United States. The open source software (OSS), called easyjson, has been widely used by the US Department of Defense and “extensively” across software used in the finance, technology, and healthcare sectors, say researchers at security company Hunted Labs, which is behind the claims. The fear is that Russia could alter easyjson to steal data or otherwise be abused.

“You have this really critical package that’s basically a linchpin for the cloud native ecosystem, that’s maintained by a group of individuals based in Moscow belonging to an organization that has this suspicious history,” says Hayden Smith, a cofounder at Hunted Labs.

For decades, open source software has underpinned large swathes of the technology industry and the systems people rely on day to day. Open source technology allows anyone to see and modify code, helping to make improvements, detect security vulnerabilities, and apply independent scrutiny that’s absent from the closed tech of corporate giants. However, the fracturing of geopolitical norms and the specter of stealthy supply chain attacks has led to an increase in questions about risk levels of "foreign" code.

Easyjson is a code serialization tool for the Go programming language and is often used across the wider cloud ecosystem, being present in other open source software, according to Hunted Labs. The package is hosted on GitHub by a MailRu account, which is owned by VK after the mail company rebranded itself in 2021. The VK Group itself is not sanctioned. Easyjson has been available on Github since 2016, with most of its updates coming before 2020. Kiriyenko became the CEO of VK Group in December 2021 and was sanctioned in February 2022.

Hunted Labs’ analysis shared with WIRED shows the most active developers on the project in recent years have listed themselves as being based in Moscow. Smith says that Hunted Labs has not identified vulnerabilities in the easyjson code.

However, the link to the sanctioned CEO’s company, plus Russia’s aggressive state-backed cyberattacks, may increase potential risks, Smith says. Research from Hunted Labs details how code serialization tools could be abused by malicious hackers. “A Russian-controlled software package could be used as a ‘sleeper cell’ to cause serious harm to critical US infrastructure or for espionage and weaponized influence campaigns,” it says.

“Nation states take on a strategic positioning,” says George Barnes, a former deputy director at the National Security Agency, who spent 36 years at the NSA and now acts as a senior advisor and investor in Hunted Labs. Barnes says that hackers within Russia’s intelligence agencies could see easyjson as a potential opportunity for abuse in the future.

“It is totally efficient code. There’s no known vulnerability about it, hence no other company has identified anything wrong with it,” Barnes says. “Yet the people who actually own it are under the guise of VK, which is tight with the Kremlin,” he says. “If I’m sitting there in the GRU or the FSB and I’m looking at the laundry list of opportunities… this is perfect. It’s just lying there,” Barnes says, referencing Russia’s foreign military and domestic security agencies.

VK Group did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about easyjson. The US Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment about the inclusion of easyjson in its software setup.

“NSA does not have a comment to make on this specific software,” a spokesperson for the National Security Agency says. “The NSA Cybersecurity Collaboration Center does welcome tips from the private sector—when a tip is received, NSA triages the tip against our own insights to fully understand the threat and, if corroborated, share any relevant mitigations with the community.” A spokesperson for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has faced upheaval under the second Trump administration, says: “We are going to refer you back to Hunted Labs.”

GitHub, a code repository owned by Microsoft, says that while it will investigate issues and take action where its policies are broken, it is not aware of malicious code in easyjson and VK is not sanctioned itself. Other tech companies’ treatment of VK varies. After Britain sanctioned the leaders of Russian banks who own stakes in VK in September 2022, for example, Apple removed its social media app from its App Store.

Dan Lorenc, the CEO of supply chain security firm Chainguard, says that with easyjson, the connections to Russia are in “plain sight” and that there is a “slightly higher” cybersecurity risk than those of other software libraries. He adds that the red flags around other open source technology may not be so obvious.

“In the overall open source space, you don’t necessarily even know where people are most of the time,” Lorenc says, pointing out that many developers do not disclose their identity or locations online, and even if they do, it is not always possible to verify the details are correct. “The code is what we have to trust and the code and the systems that are used to build that code. People are important, but we’re just not in a world where we can push the trust down to the individuals,” Lorenc says.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has unfolded, there has been increased scrutiny on the use of open source systems and the impact of sanctions upon entities involved in the development. In October last year, a Linux kernel maintainer removed 11 Russian developers who were involved in the open souce project, broadly citing sanctions as the reason for the change. Then in January this year, the Linux Foundation issued guidance covering how international sanctions can impact open source, saying developers should be cautious of who they interact with and the nature of interactions.

The shift in perceived risk is coupled with the threat of supply chain attacks. Last year, corporate developers and the open source world were rocked as a mysterious attacker known as Jia Tan stealthily installed a backdoor in the widely used XZ Utils software, after spending two years diligently updating it without any signs of trouble. The backdoor was only discovered by chance.

“Years ago, OSS was developed by small groups of trusted developers who were known to one another,” says Nancy Mead, a fellow of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. “In that time frame, no one expected a trusted developer of being a hacker, and the relatively slower pace provided time for review. These days, with automatic release, incorporation of updates, and the wide usage of OSS, the old assumptions are no longer valid.”

Scott Hissam, a senior member of technical staff also from the Carnegie Software Engineering Institute, says there can often be consideration about how many maintainers and the number of organizations that work on an open source project, but there is currently not a “mass movement” to consider other details about OSS projects. “However, it is coming, and there are several activities that collect details about OSS projects, which OSS consumers can use to get more insight into OSS projects and their activities,” Hissam says, pointing to two examples.

Hunted Lab’s Smith says he is currently looking into the provenance of other open source projects and the risks that could come with them, including scrutinizing countries known to have carried out cyberattacks against US entities. He says he is not encouraging people to avoid open source software at all, more that risk considerations have shifted over time. “We’re telling you to just make really good risk informed decisions when you're trying to use open source,” he says. “Open source software is basically good until it's not.”

Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a 'Persistent' Risk to the US

Plus: France blames Russia for a series of cyberattacks, the US is taking steps to crack down on a gray market allegedly used by scammers, and Microsoft pushes the password one step closer to death.

Researchers unveiled a cluster of vulnerabilities in Apple’s wireless media streaming platform AirPlay this week that leave millions of third-party devices like speakers and TVs vulnerable to takeover if an attacker is on the same Wi-Fi network as the victim gadget. These “AirBorne” vulnerabilities have all been patched—including some that potentially impacted Apple’s Mac computers—but, in practice, third-party devices may not all get fixes, and even if they do, patch adoption could be low.

Records reviewed by WIRED show that utilizing car subscription features can substantially raise your risk of being subjected to government surveillance, because such services generate troves of data that are valuable to law enforcement. WIRED also did a deep dive on North Korea’s yearslong campaign to place IT workers inside companies in North American, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The schemes are more effective than ever as scammers incorporate AI into their workflows.

WhatsApp designed a special cloud processing platform called Private Processing to allow new AI tools to work in the secure messenger without compromising its end-to-end encryption. Experts warn, though, that it could create enticing targets for hackers. And we have a guide for navigating the privacy risks of using ChatGPT’s new image generator to do seemingly fun and innocuous projects like making an action figure version of yourself.

But wait, there's more! Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

**Three British Retailers Hacked in Spate of Cyberattacks**

Three separate retailers in the UK—including the supermarket Co-op and thedepartment stores Marks & Spencer and Harrods—have all revealed they have recently been subject to cyberattacks, with the intrusions and widespread impact seemingly ongoing. Toward the end of April, Marks & Spencer revealed it had been the victim of a “cyber incident.” Over the following two weeks, it has been forced to pause online orders within its apps, some food has been missing from its shelves, and it has paused recruitment and other “normal processes.” Staff at Co-op have been told to keep webcams turned on during remote meetings and check who is attending calls, after shutting down parts of its IT systems in response to its own hack. Harrods, meanwhile, told customers to “not do anything differently at this point.”

At the time of writing, none of the retailers have detailed the specific nature of the cyberattacks or the full scale of the impacts. It is also unclear if the attacks are linked. Bloomberg has reported a ransomware cartel dubbed DragonForce has claimed it and its partners were behind the attacks. The so-called cartel provides “infrastructure and tools” to hackers but “doesn't require affiliates to deploy its ransomware,” according to research from security firm Secureworks. The hacked companies did not respond to Bloomberg about the claims.

Bleeping Computer originally reported that the threat actors known as Scattered Spider were allegedly behind the attack on Marks & Spencer. The publication reported that the company’s servers were encrypted by ransomware, with the intrusion beginning as early as February. The attribution to Scattered Spider has not been confirmed by Marks & Spencer.

Over the past two years, Scattered Spider has emerged as one of the most prolific and dangerous sets of hackers currently operating. The threat actors are not a well-defined group of hackers. Instead, they’re more a loose collective that uses social engineering—such as phishing and voice calls—to gain initial access into company networks. Scattered Spider members are often English-speaking, teenaged, and can be members of the heinous criminal group the Com. The hackers have been active since June 2022 and have targeted more than 100 companies—including the high-profile hacks on Caesar's Entertainment and MGM Resorts in 2023.

**France (Finally) Names Russian Hackers for the First Time**

French authorities have condemned Russia’s military intelligence agency, accusing it of orchestrating a series of high-profile cyberattacks—including the hacking of Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign, a brazen 2015 assault on the TV channel TV5 Monde, and recent intrusion attempts targeting organizations involved in preparing the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

French authorities have also disclosed the name and location of a GRU unit tied to the notorious hacking group APT28—information that had never before been officially released. Unit 20728 is based in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and operates out of the "166th Information Research Center."

This marks the first time French officials have publicly assigned blame to a foreign intelligence service following an internal attribution process. The timing is significant, coming as Paris positions itself at the forefront of Europe’s support for Ukraine.

**US Moves to Crack Down on ‘Largest Illicit Marketplace’**

The Trump administration has taken the first step toward blacklisting a Cambodian financial conglomerate at the center of a global money laundering network. On Thursday, the Treasury Department designated Huione Group as a money-laundering operation, alleging that the company and its affiliates have laundered more than $4 billion for criminals, including North Korean hackers and online scammers.

These scammers—who defraud victims through bogus investments and other schemes—rely on Huione and its affiliates to move funds abroad to evade both law enforcement and anti-money-laundering systems. The proposed action represents the most significant effort yet to crack down on Huione, which is tied to what experts believe to be the “largest illicit marketplace”: Huione Guarantee. According to WIRED’s January report, the marketplace has likely facilitated over $24 billion in gray-market transactions. Experts believe the platform operates as a one-stop shop for scammers, offering everything from victim contact lists and deepfake tools to fake investment websites and other illicit services.

**New Microsoft Accounts Won’t Need Passwords Anymore**

Slowly but surely, the password is dying. Over the past two years, passkeys—a stronger method of authentication that doesn’t require you to remember or use a password—have become more common. The rollout of the technology has been piecemeal, but big tech companies have worked for years to create the alternative, which is more secure than passwords. This week, Microsoft announced that people setting up new accounts with the company won’t have to create passwords at all. “New Microsoft accounts will now be ‘passwordless by default,’” the company wrote in a blog post. Microsoft is also pushing people further away from passwords and will “detect” the best way for people to lo in to their accounts if they have set up alternatives to passwords.

Hacking Spree Hits UK Retail Giants

A photo taken this week showed Mike Waltz using an app that looks like—but is not—Signal to communicate with top officials. "I don't even know where to start with this," says one expert.

On ThursdaY, Reuters published a photo depicting then-United States national security adviser Mike Waltz checking his phone during a cabinet meeting held by President Trump in the White House. If you enlarge the portion of the image that captures Waltz’s screen, it seems to show him using the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal. But if you look more closely, a notification on the screen refers to the app as “TM SGNL.” During a White House cabinet meeting on Wednesday, then, Waltz was apparently using an Israeli-made app called TeleMessage Signal to message with people who appear to be top US officials, including JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Tulsi Gabbard.

After senior Trump administration cabinet members used vanishing Signal messages to coordinate March military strikes in Yemen—and accidentally included the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the group chat—the “SignalGate” scandal highlighted concerning breaches of traditional government “operational security” protocol as well as compliance issues with federal records-retention laws. At the center of the debacle was Waltz, who was ousted by Trump as US national security adviser on Thursday. Waltz created the “Houthi PC Small Group” chat and was the member who added top Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. "I take full responsibility. I built the group," Waltz told Fox News in late March. "We've got the best technical minds looking at how this happened," he added at the time.

SignalGate had nothing to do with Signal. The app was functioning normally and was simply being used at an inappropriate time for an incredibly sensitive discussion that should have been carried out on special-purpose, hardened federal devices and software platforms. If you're going to flout the protocols, though, Signal is (relatively speaking) a good place to do it, because the app is designed so only the senders and receivers of messages in a group chat can read them. And the app is built to collect as little information as possible about its users and their associates. This means that if US government officials were chatting on the app, spies or malicious hackers could only access their communications by directly compromising participants' devices—a challenge that is potentially surmountable but at least limits possible access points. Using an app like TeleMessage Signal, though, presumably in an attempt to comply with data retention requirements, opens up numerous other paths for adversaries to access messages.

"I don't even know where to start with this," says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy. “It's mind-blowing that the federal government is using Israeli tech to route extremely sensitive data for archival purposes. You just know that someone is grabbing a copy of that data. Even if TeleMessage isn't willingly giving it up, they have just become one of the biggest nation-state targets out there.”

TeleMessage was founded in Israel in 1999 by former Israel Defense Forces technologists and run out of the country until it was acquired last year by the US-based digital communications archiving company Smarsh. The service creates duplicates of communication apps that are outfitted with a “mobile archiver” tool to record and store messages sent through the app.

“Capture, archive and monitor mobile communication: SMS, MMS, Voice Calls, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram & Signal,” TeleMessage says on its website. For Signal it adds, “Record and capture Signal calls, texts, multimedia and files on corporate-issued and employee BYOD phones.” (BYOD stands for bring your own device.) In other words, there are TeleMessage versions of Signal for essentially any mainstream consumer device. The company says that using TeleMessage Signal, users can “Maintain all Signal app features and functionality as well as the Signal encryption,” adding that the app provides “End-to-End encryption from the mobile phone through to the corporate archive.” The existence of “the corporate archive,” though, undermines the privacy and security of the end-to-end encryption scheme.

TeleMessage apps are not approved for use under the US government's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program or FedRAMP. TeleMessage and Smarsh did not immediately return requests for comment about whether their products are used by the US federal government and in what capacity.

"As we have said many times, Signal is an approved app for government use and is loaded on government phones,” White House press secretary Anna Kelly tells WIRED. She did not answer questions about whether the White House approves of federal officials using TeleMessage Signal—which is a different app from Signal—or whether other officials aside from Waltz have used the app or currently use it.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency does not create policy around federal technology use but does release public guidance. When asked about Waltz’s apparent use of TeleMessage Signal, CISA simply referred WIRED to its best-practices guide for mobile communications. The document specifically advises, “When selecting an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, evaluate the extent to which the app and associated services collect and store metadata.”

It is not clear when Waltz started using TeleMessage Signal and whether he was already using it during SignalGate or started using it afterward in response to criticisms that turning on Signal's disappearing messages feature is in conflict with federal data-retention laws.

“I have no doubt the leadership of the US national security apparatus ran this software through a full information-assurance process to ensure there was no information leakage to foreign nations,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matt Green. “Because if they didn’t, we are screwed.”

Mike Waltz Has Somehow Gotten Even Worse at Using Signal

People are using ChatGPT’s new image generator to take part in viral social media trends. But using it also puts your privacy at risk—unless you take a few simple steps to protect yourself.

At the start of April, an influx of action figures started appearing on social media sites including LinkedIn and X. Each figure depicted the person who had created it with uncanny accuracy, complete with personalized accessories such as reusable coffee cups, yoga mats, and headphones.

All this is possible because of OpenAI’s new GPT-4o-powered image generator, which supercharges ChatGPT’s ability to edit pictures, render text, and more. OpenAI’s ChatGPT image generator can also create pictures in the style of Japanese animated film company Studio Ghibli—a trend that quickly went viral, too.

The images are fun and easy to make—all you need is a free ChatGPT account and a photo. Yet to create an action figure or Studio Ghibli-style image, you also need to hand over a lot of data to OpenAI, which could be used to train its models.

**Hidden Data**

The data you are giving away when you use an AI image editor is often hidden. Every time you upload an image to ChatGPT, you’re potentially handing over “an entire bundle of metadata,” says Tom Vazdar, area chair for cybersecurity at Open Institute of Technology. “That includes the EXIF data attached to the image file, such as the time the photo was taken and the GPS coordinates of where it was shot.”

OpenAI also collects data about the device you’re using to access the platform. That means your device type, operating system, browser version, and unique identifiers, says Vazdar. “And because platforms like ChatGPT operate conversationally, there’s also behavioral data, such as what you typed, what kind of images you asked for, how you interacted with the interface and the frequency of those actions.”

It's not just your face. If you upload a high-resolution photo, you're giving OpenAI whatever else is in the image, too—the background, other people, things in your room and anything readable such as documents or badges, says Camden Woollven, group head of AI product marketing at risk management firm GRC International Group.

This type of voluntarily provided, consent-backed data is “a gold mine for training generative models,” especially multimodal ones that rely on visual inputs, says Vazdar.

OpenAI denies it is orchestrating viral photo trends as a ploy to collect user data, yet the firm certainly gains an advantage from it. OpenAI doesn’t need to scrape the web for your face if you’re happily uploading it yourself, Vazdar points out. “This trend, whether by design or a convenient opportunity, is providing the company with massive volumes of fresh, high-quality facial data from diverse age groups, ethnicities, and geographies.”

OpenAI says it does not actively seek out personal information to train models—and it doesn’t use public data on the internet to build profiles about people to advertise to them or sell their data, an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED. However, under OpenAI’s current privacy policy, images submitted through ChatGPT can be retained and used to improve its models.

Any data, prompts, or requests you share helps teach the algorithm—and personalized information helps fine tune it further, says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at security outfit ESET, who created his own action figure to demonstrate the privacy risks of the trend on LinkedIn.

**Uncanny Likeness**

In some markets, your photos are protected by regulation. In the UK and EU, data-protection regulation including the GDPR offer strong protections, including the right to access or delete your data. At the same time, use of biometric data requires explicit consent.

However, photographs become biometric data only when processed through a specific technical means allowing the unique identification of a specific individual, says Melissa Hall, senior associate at law firm MFMac. Processing an image to create a cartoon version of the subject in the original photograph is “unlikely to meet this definition,” she says.

Meanwhile, in the US, privacy protections vary. “California and Illinois are leading with stronger data protection laws, but there is no standard position across all US states,” says Annalisa Checchi, a partner at IP law firm Ionic Legal. And OpenAI’s privacy policy doesn’t contain an explicit carve-out for likeness or biometric data, which “creates a grey area for stylized facial uploads,” Checchi says.

The risks include your image or likeness being retained, potentially used to train future models, or combined with other data for profiling, says Checchi. “While these platforms often prioritize safety, the long-term use of your likeness is still poorly understood—and hard to retract once uploaded.”

OpenAI says its users’ privacy and security is a top priority. The firm wants its AI models to learn about the world, not private individuals, and it actively minimizes the collection of personal information, an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED.

Meanwhile, users have control over how their data is used, with self-service tools to access, export, or delete personal information. You can also opt out of having content used to improve models, according to OpenAI.

ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro users can control whether they contribute to future model improvements in their data controls settings. OpenAI does not train on ChatGPT Team, Enterprise, and Edu customer data⁠ by default, according to the company.

**Trending Topics**

The next time you are tempted to jump on a ChatGPT-led trend such as the action figure or Studio Ghibli–style images, it’s wise to consider the privacy trade-off. The risks apply to ChatGPT as well as many other AI image editing or generation tools, so it’s important to read the privacy policy before uploading your photos.

There are also steps you can take to protect your data. In ChatGPT, the most effective is to turn off chat history, which helps ensure your data is not used for training, says Vazdar. You can also upload anonymized or modified images, for example, using a filter or generating a digital avatar rather than an actual photo, he says.

It’s worth stripping out metadata from image files before uploading, which is possible using photo editing tools. “Users should avoid prompts that include sensitive personal information and refrain from uploading group photos or anything with identifiable background features,” says Vazdar.

Double-check your OpenAI account settings, especially those related to data use for training, Hall adds. “Be mindful of whether any third-party tools are involved, and never upload someone else’s photo without their consent. OpenAI’s terms make it clear that you’re responsible for what you upload, so awareness is key.”

Checchi recommends disabling model training in OpenAI’s settings, avoiding location-tagged prompts, and steering clear of linking content to social profiles. “Privacy and creativity aren’t mutually exclusive—you just need to be a bit more intentional.”

Think Twice Before Creating That ChatGPT Action Figure

For years, North Korea has been secretly placing young IT workers inside Western companies. With AI, their schemes are now more devious—and effective—than ever.

Source

Wired