United States – It is a new elementary cybersecurity failure for the Trump administration. Sunday, May 4, the specialized media 404Media revealed how a hacker had managed in less than twenty minutes to hack the encrypted messaging used by the United States government. Named Telemessage, its owners announced to the Reuters agency to suspend the service.
This application of the Israeli company SMARSH provides modified versions of famous encrypted messaging such as Telegram or Signal. It is a clone of the latter, entitled TM Signal, which has been targeted and which makes it possible to archive the messages (and thereby compromises the interest of these secure applications). last week, Mike Waltz who was still a national security advisor, had been photographed using it, revealing his use by the Trump administration.
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This shot had already aroused controversy because Mike Waltz had already accidentally included a journalist from The Atlantic in a signal loop intended to plan bombing. And see him discuss by a less secure version than the basic application questions the security of the American administration. And for good reason …
Pirated compromising data
If the hacker could not access all of the archived conversations of government members, the hacked datas are nonetheless compromising. Among them, personal discussions and information from civil servants and policies, or data from employee of the customs and border protection service.
The telephone numbers of employees of Coinbase and Galaxy cryptocurrencies are also on the list of victims of this hacking. A message sent to a conversation potentially linked to this last company reveals the strategies to be implemented to adopt a controversial bill on cryptocurrencies.
But above all, this hack revealed that the solution used for the Trump administration to archive its messages is not encrypted from start to finish. The hacker explained to 404Media having targeted Telemessage because he was ” curious to know how secure the application was ». He adds: ” If I was able to find this in less than 30 minutes, then anyone else could do it too. And who has known how long the application has been vulnerable? »
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