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If US allies are not worries about their secrets being leaked on warthunder discord, they should probably also sleep tight for some adversary being invited in signal group chat. I doubt that Ayatollah Khomeini is on Walz or Vance shortdial unlike the chief editor of the atlantic. Everyone is pearlclutching because they hate the current admin.
When it comes to fuckups - i would say this is run of the mill one. As a person that has dealt with security and opsec - at some point you just accept that C level people will do stupid stuff and move on. That secrets will be sent in plaintext. That passwords will be written on post it stamps or spell to the secretary in the cafeteria where everyone can overhear.
It's not a nothingburger, but it is a veggieburger. It is humiliating, but not terribly dangerous.
Btw - if some high level Trump admin person is reading this - check threema. The great part about it is that doesn't require any kind of id, and the id themselves are just hex symbols. it is open source and a proper audit of the clients by the USG will be great for everyone.
I work in cybersecurity and this is my reaction as well. Overall, I'm honestly very impressed that they used Signal. Nature is healing!
It was dumb of them to add a journalist to "Houthi PC small group" chat but shit happens.
Yes yes ideally they would not be discussing this on their extremely difficult to secure smartphones and instead followed official guidance to use MS Teams with whatever dumb compliance features Microsoft added but we all know C level execs aren't going to listen. I don't even blame them.
Imagine how awful the federal government's approved classified information messaging things are.
This is the same reason I didn't hold it against HRC for having her own email server. Imagine how shitty the State Dept's approved mail service would have been in 2009.
(Though that's obviously a lot less secure than Signal)
Willing to bet that the teams solution is less secure than properly updated iphone or android with signal.
Right. From a box checking perspective I'm sure it has all of the security features they want. From a practical perspective I'm sure every foreign intelligence agency knows multiple backdoors for it.
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You're right in your statement.
Still, the relevant metric isn't security of proper usage, it's security when used by the bottom decile of expect users.
The approved messaging service is likely much harder to fuck up.
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