Senate Democrat calls on DOJ to investigate risks from Signal-like app
Wyden, in a letter sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asked for an investigation into the 'serious' national security threat posed by TeleMessage, 'a federal contractor that sold dangerously insecure communications software' to the White House and other federal agencies.
The Democrat said the federal agencies, including former national security adviser Mike Waltz, 'recklessly entrusted' TeleMessage, an Israeli company that Wyden said claims to offer a secure tool to archive messages sent via Signal. Instead, the app is a 'shoddy Signal knockoff' that poses a threat to security due to its archive system.
Wyden highlighted a security researcher who found that the company sends unencrypted copies of every message to a server. Each message is 'seemingly available' to anyone within the company or to anyone who has access to the server, Wyden said.
He noted that since the app is unsecure, it has been repeatedly hacked recently.
Technology site 404 Media recently reported that a hacker exploited a vulnerability in TeleMessage and was able to access some direct messages and group chats.
Waltz was ousted from his national security position last week after a scandal over his use and creation of a Signal group to share updates about the U.S. attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen with other administration officials. The situation escalated after a photo taken during a cabinet meeting showed Waltz using TeleMessage to chat with officials including Vice President Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The scandal sparked concern about national security and the administration's communication platforms. It worsened once hackers gained access to TeleMessage and prompted the site to temporarily suspend services 'out of an abundance of caution,' Reuters reported.
'TeleMessage Archiver is a modified version of Signal that looks the same as Signal and can be used to communicate with other Signal users. The White House seemingly adopted TeleMessage Archiver in the wake of the 'Signalgate' scandal this year,' Wyden wrote to Bondi.
After The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed Waltz created the Signal group chat with other administration officials, it was noted that he set the group chat's settings to have messages auto-erase after a certain number of weeks. After Waltz was reminded of federal recordkeeping laws, Wyden said it appeared the White House 'equipped' him with the TeleMessage app.
Wyden was calling on the DOJ to investigate TeleMessage's misleading messages to the federal government about its security and end-to-end encryption, as well as the hacking of the platform.
He also called for an investigation into the counterintelligence threat posed by the app, to determine the extent to which foreign employees of the company have access to government users' messages and if the company has shared U.S. government communications with foreign governments, particularly the Israeli government.
'It remains unclear whether the design of this system was merely the result of incompetence on the part of the foreign company, whose senior leadership are former intelligence officers, or a backdoor designed to facilitate foreign intelligence collection against U.S. government officials,' Wyden wrote. 'Regardless, TeleMessage's dangerously insecure design should have been discovered long before the company's app was installed on the phone of the President's national security advisor and, presumably, other senior White House officials.'
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