WASHINGTON — 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.
Once little known outside government and finance circles, TeleMessage drew media attention after an April 30 Reuters photograph showed Waltz checking TeleMessage’s version of the privacy-focused app Signal during a cabinet meeting.
Jake Williams, a former National Security Agency cyber specialist, said that, even if the intercepted text messages were innocuous, the wealth of metadata — the who and when of the leaked conversations and chat groups — posed a counterintelligence risk.
