A hacker who breached the communications service used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month intercepted messages from a broader swathe of American officials than has previously been reported, according to a Reuters review, potentially raising the stakes of a breach that has already drawn questions about data security in the Trump administration.
Reuters identified more than 60 unique government users of the messaging platform TeleMessage in a cache of leaked data provided by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. nonprofit whose stated mission is to archive hacked and leaked documents in the public interest. The trove included material from disaster responders, customs officials, several U.S. diplomatic staffers, at least one White House staffer and members of the Secret Service. The messages reviewed by Reuters covered a roughly day-long period of time ending on May 4, and many of them were fragmentary.
While Reuters could not verify the entire contents of the TeleMessage trove, in more than half a dozen cases the news agency was able to establish that the phone numbers in the leaked data were correctly attributed to their owners. One of the intercepted texts’ recipients - an applicant for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency - confirmed to Reuters that the leaked message was authentic; a financial services firm whose messages were similarly intercepted also confirmed their authenticity.
Due to PII in the dataset and the inclusion of groups and messages unrelated to government or corporate behavior, the data is currently only being offered to journalists and researchers. Request access
I just wanna know if there was anything interesting on recent events like what went down with the India-Pakistan BVR fight and subsequent ceasfire.
ChatGPT would run the country better at this point.
This administration is a total clown show.
Some of us predicted this.
The rest of us wanted this.
The catch: Many predicted, and wanted.
Most predicted this.
Many wanted this.
The remainder are ignorant.
That hits hard.
We need a new comparison, it’s an insult to clown shows at this point.
Given how basic and severe the security failings were in TeleMessage, I’m not sure this can really be called stealing.
I’m more than ten years old, so I can remember all the way back to the Before Times. 2015. President Obama.
Try to imagine the response from Republicans if Obama had hired people this fucking stupid. Try to imagine the clusterfuck that would have rightly ensued if his advisors had used an insecure and easily hacked messaging app to illegally circumvent the Presidential Records Act.
Now try to picture those same Republicans applying the same standards to Trump. Doesn’t work, does it? It’s like trying to imagine a square circle.
Hell Bush 2 is pretty stupid, the thing that saved him was he made sure to hire and listen to reasonably smart, if evil advisors .
At this point, I’m probably more trusting of the rogue actors stealing the data than the administration officials who were given access to it as part of their official duties.
It’s not like there was an existing security infrastructure vetted over the years that also saves communication for posterity. You know, like all non trump administrations used.
Leak the pee tapes already
