So one of their servers had a /heapdump endpoint that publicly served a heap dump of the server? This whole saga is out of control.
This group didn’t really “publish” anything, though. They’re offering access to journalists through a request form. They’re also not saying how much actual message content they have because the 410GB of heap dumps makes for a bigger headline number.
mingus88 13 hours ago [-]
Can you imagine co-opting a trusted and secure (and free) bit of software and just making it worse at seemingly every turn?
And charging for it?!
I’m not sure what is more embarrassing: to be the company or to be a user.
miki123211 4 hours ago [-]
This is why Signal is so opposed to third-party apps (or forks) that connect to their service.
If you want to keep the branding of Signal being the secure app, you need to make sure that all Signal users are actually using a secure version of Signal.
If an insecure fork (like this one) becomes too popular, most groups will have at least one member using it, and then the security is gone.
calvinmorrison 2 hours ago [-]
That doesn't seem to be a problem for protocols and having a single implementation can lead to bugs that defy spec yet cause no issues obviously.
ctxc 1 hours ago [-]
But you're not branding or selling implementations
ctxc 1 hours ago [-]
*protocols
hypeatei 12 hours ago [-]
Why would the company be embarrassed? The users (i.e. high level U.S. officials) did no due diligence. Of course a private company is going to take the easiest and cheapest route. If it goes bad, just shut down and spin up a new entity.
Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
n2d4 12 hours ago [-]
> Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
How does this make sense? If they were gathering data, why would they add a public download? Surely the Israeli officials would not want foreign powers to access this?
Per Hanlon's razor, I don't think this is attributable to anything other than incompetence.
barbazoo 11 hours ago [-]
Two things can be true at once. Them using their access to unencrypted messages for nefarious purposes and them being incompetent at the same time leaving that endpoint open.
jojohohanon 11 hours ago [-]
There’s room for both sides of the razor. The heapdumpz could be there maliciously, but incompetently made globally accessible.
pigbearpig 11 hours ago [-]
From the Wired article: "The archive server is programmed in Java and is built using Spring Boot, an open source framework for creating Java applications. Spring Boot includes a set of features called Actuator that helps developers monitor and debug their applications. One of these features is the heap dump endpoint,"
So the heapdumps being available is a Spring Boot feature so it does not appear to be malicious.
evrflx 9 hours ago [-]
This feature must be explicitly enabled, it is not on by default nor by accident.
bryanrasmussen 9 hours ago [-]
huh, I sure seem to be needing to debug this a lot, I guess I'll just leave it turned on all the time that way I can say a few seconds next time. Larry Wall says one of the virtues of being a great developer is laziness!
szundi 8 hours ago [-]
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notpushkin 11 hours ago [-]
I mean, one doesn’t preclude the other. This could be an incompetent intentional intelligence gathering.
g-b-r 12 hours ago [-]
I mean, it could theoretically have been to provide plausible deniability, but it seems extremely more likely to have been incompetence and carelessness (and if they were also sending everything to Israel, it was probably through some unencrypted ftp upload).
aucisson_masque 6 hours ago [-]
The Israeli would have made it secure so only them can access the data because knowing someone else's secret is worth something only when it's still a secret, if china, Russia and everyone can read the log of the American government it's worth nothing.
dylan604 12 hours ago [-]
>Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
Which does not bode well for the customers' counter intelligence abilities
bigbacaloa 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
donnachangstein 9 hours ago [-]
> The users (i.e. high level U.S. officials) did no due diligence.
But why would they? It's not their job. They have massive IT staff supporting them. "High level U.S. officials" are just executives; the pointy-haired bosses to the pointy-haired boss. Only difference is these wear little decorative pins over their breast pocket.
Every Fortune 500 company has dedicated IT staff for execs; someone you can call 24/7 and say "my shit's broke" and they respond "we just overnighted you a new phone".
These people couldn't even install an app on their MDM-controlled device, now the narrative has become we expect them to be making low-level IT decisions too?
Next week we'll be scrutinizing Pete Hegseth's lack of thoughts on rotating backup tapes.
Jedd 9 hours ago [-]
> ... narrative has become we expect them to be making low-level IT decisions too?
I think that's a misdirection.
The narrative is that:
a) they were using a compromised piece of software
b) they should not have been using that software - not (necessarily) because it was compromised, but because it wasn't US DoD accredited for that use case.
(I understand your point that these guys are not tech savvy, and do not need to be, but they should be regulation-savvy (clearly they either are not, or willingly broke those regulations), and they should be following organisational guidelines that presumably cover the selection and use of these tools types.)
nkrisc 3 hours ago [-]
> now the narrative has become we expect them to be making low-level IT decisions too?
If their staff makes bad decisions, that’s their failure too.
We expect them to be ultimately responsible for what happens on their watch.
Was it Truman who said, “Woah, don’t bring the buck anywhere near me, it stops with my assistant”.
danieldk 9 hours ago [-]
It is too early to tell, but given that these people openly attack scientists and other experts (they don’t agree with), I wouldn’t be surprised if they ignored advise of their IT experts.
input_sh 3 hours ago [-]
It's not too early to tell, we knew from the beginning that the use of Signal (let alone its clone) was not authorised to be used for such communications.
Yes, there's a fleet of people who are supposed to make such tech decisions. The people involved specifically went against those rules. The existence of a group chat using an authorised app is a violation on its own, adding a journalist to it is a violation on top of a violation.
Adding a journalist was accidental, but using such an app (despite it not being approved) is very intentional.
cornholio 9 hours ago [-]
IT staff that knew it was illegal to provide them tools for a conspiracy were fired or silenced. So the only people left were their cronies, who instantly complied with their illegal request, to the best of the cronies' abilities. For such national failures, the buck has to stop at the very top, not on some IT monkey.
This is typical for highly corrupt governments and autocracies, they crumble from within because the autocrats can't trust random, competent people so their inner circle becomes saturated with people who are selected on the basis of loyalty not competence, and these people end up making the most important decisions and running the country.
hristov 9 hours ago [-]
Their massive it staff provides them with a way to communicate securely and they ignore it deliberately so that their communications are not preserved for history or for future court cases.
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago [-]
One man's low Integrity (in the "CIA triad" sense) of communications is another man's improved plausible deniability.
3rdDeviation 8 hours ago [-]
Would tend to agree with most of that, but I think the assertion is Petey needed to ask his IT leadership to do the due diligence before diving in, not that he needed to decide using his own depth of skills and experience.
I assume he did and they said it was a bad idea - the memo they'd released a few weeks prior about Signal vulnerabilities seems to suggest a lack of faith in that approach - but he was already banging away on his phone with all the grocery reminders and definitely not battle plans he needs to keep pushing out. Which is also how it feels in the enterprise space these days.
Strange thing to see our bureaucracy start to behave like a corporation instead of the other way around.
12 hours ago [-]
kube-system 12 hours ago [-]
The changes to the application are intentional by all parties because message archiving was required by law.
brookst 12 hours ago [-]
Sure, but they were not required to be done incompetently and insecurely.
sneak 10 hours ago [-]
The fundamental concept of plaintext archiving (escrow) of messages from e2ee messaging apps is insecure by most definitions.
They could have used user-custody public key cryptography, where the end devices have the pubkey of the customer, and archive only re-encrypted messages to TM that they can’t read.
That is not, of course, what they did. They just archive them in plaintext.
kevincox 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think it is. I can archive my own messages and E2E security on the messaging layer means I don't have to trust the operator of the messaging service to not read my messages because they can't. The choice of how I archive the messages is completely orthogonal to the choice of messaging platform security. I could choose to use an E2EE approach if I want but in that case it probably wasn't even desired as the point was to have these be archived for audit purposes. (Of course they are more secure options such as archiving to an audit key, but this is still orthogonal to the concern of the messaging protocol)
_kb 11 hours ago [-]
Well, I suppose technically this /heapdump endpoint does satisfy that archive requirement.
yapyap 7 hours ago [-]
User for sure
HenryBemis 8 hours ago [-]
(read with sarcastic tone) But hey, this is a 'lite' version or a 'red' version (icon is red) or a 'purple' version (icon is purple), so I am cooler that then others that have the standard.
I haven't used WhatsApp for 'a very long time' as I have exited the FB ecosystem, but back in the day I remember seeing "lite" or "WhatsApp+" or other variations of the software. I wouldn't be surprised that those "lite" or "+" come with baggage.
BearOso 48 minutes ago [-]
> They’re also not saying how much actual message content they have because the 410GB of heap dumps makes for a bigger headline number.
That's very important to say. I went through one of these massive data dumps recently and it was literally all cached operating system package updates and routine logs. Nothing at all of interest.
It's easy to cut the size on a heap dump. When it's not done it seems sketchy. But it could be a 512GB dump and already pruned, so I could be wrong.
barbazoo 13 hours ago [-]
Aren’t those Israeli software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex Mossad, yadda yadda? Doesn’t sound like it.
I hope the message dump is juicy.
msy 11 hours ago [-]
And SBF of FTX fame was ex-Jane St so obviously was a serious finance professional. This is why using past employers as a shorthand for capability is unwise.
sillystu04 6 hours ago [-]
In fairness, FTX had a profitable bankruptcy [1]. So it's still better to be scammed by Jane Street alumni than to be scammed by the usual alumni of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc
How is that fair? It was luck from the AI investment. Pure luck.
bn-l 2 hours ago [-]
It wasn’t the only smart investment
gruez 12 hours ago [-]
I thought Israel has mandatory military service, so ex-mossad or ex-military signals intelligence doesn't really say much? Presumably they're directing people based on their skill set, so you'd expect most hackers to end up in mossad for their mandatory service.
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
> Presumably they're directing people based on their skill set
Big presumption.
If I were israeli, there’s no way in hell anybody with half a brain would want me near their spy agency.
When a gov is committing a genocide, their decisions are based on control and fear, not getting the best out of people.
Edit: downvote all you want. Israel is still committing a genocide. No hospitals left standing. Killing aid workers, journalists, and doctors. A million people on the brink of starvation. Literally salting the earth to prevent crops from being grown. That is war crimes, ghettoization, and genocide.
viraptor 12 hours ago [-]
That's not a great generalisation for the whole country. How many ex Mossad people interested in doing actual implementation in tech companies do you think there are? It's like "aren't those US software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex NSA yadda yadda?"
The US only has voluntary military service, so the dynamics are different
lysp 11 hours ago [-]
The CEO/Founder of TeleMessage Guy Levit was the head of the Planning and Development Department of an elite technical unit in the Intelligence Corps of the IDF according to bio.
rsynnott 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why you'd expect intelligence agency types to be particularly good at engineering, tbh.
rainworld 3 hours ago [-]
Spooks in general like to project a veneer of competence, downright invincibility. Entertainment media, journalists, experts play a big role in this. And by and large it works.
It’s especially true for spooks of a certain entity. Also, it’s easy to confuse brazenness, being protected from consequences, and usually downplayed or secret Western complicity with competence.
rsynnott 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, I'm sure they're competent in some stuff, but being competent in one field doesn't generally mean being magically competent in _all_ fields.
oceanplexian 11 hours ago [-]
One problem that smart people tend to make is in thinking that being really smart in one area is generalizable to all others. Just because they're good at AppSec doesn't mean they're good at networking or operating a webserver.
ripley12 10 hours ago [-]
I agree with this. It's surprising how often I encounter people with that belief, because I was disabused of it very early on in my career; this industry is chockablock with people who are brilliant in 1 area and deficient in others.
coolcase 4 hours ago [-]
That's why you need teams. Red team for example! Security team. App developers. Code reviews. You need all the process too. Security that relies on one genius is fragile.
czl 2 hours ago [-]
Aka "halo effect"
karn97 9 hours ago [-]
That sounds more like a stupid person than smart lol
stefs 5 hours ago [-]
you can be smart in one area and stupid in others. the "not knowing you're stupid in others" is part of the "stupid in others".
underdeserver 9 hours ago [-]
"All supposed to be".
This is a country of 10 million people, a rather heterogeneous one at that. There are going to be better and worse companies.
coolcase 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah the /leakitbaby endpoint was meant for just them, not the world! Doh!
H8crilA 7 hours ago [-]
They are top notch - at working for profit and for the interests of their country.
treebeard901 8 hours ago [-]
After all the concern over China and TikTok, why is the USG using a foreign chat program at all?
coolcase 4 hours ago [-]
SuperPAC and other corruption
ExoticPearTree 5 hours ago [-]
> Aren’t those Israeli software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex Mossad, yadda yadda?
Working with a few companies like these, I can tell you that the marketing is top-notch, and very aggressive. The products not so. Most get better with time.
Calwestjobs 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
basilgohar 12 hours ago [-]
This article doesn't mention Mossad, though. Do you have any other sources?
Is this a heapdump of servers or of clients? I can imagine that might have been intended as a place for crashing clients to log
kleton 18 minutes ago [-]
TeleMessage is most likely an intelligence asset, and a burned one now that Trump's people stopped using it. A fake hack is the safest way for the agency responsible to leak the messages collected.
jfim 12 hours ago [-]
Sounds like someone had a Java app and mistakenly exposed all of the JMX endpoints over HTTP. It's not the default configuration, and likely done out of carelessness.
pigbearpig 11 hours ago [-]
From the Wired article, it may not have even been a mistake, depending on the version of Spring Boot.
"Spring Boot Actuator. “Up until version 1.5 (released in 2017), the /heapdump endpoint was configured as publicly exposed and accessible without authentication by default."
davedx 6 hours ago [-]
This sounds utterly insane. Is Actuator a standard part of Spring Boot or is it an optional package of some kind?
teekert 5 hours ago [-]
Imaging putting up a firewall to mitigate this, then docker compose helpfully opening the ports for you. Security comes in layers.
callamdelaney 38 minutes ago [-]
This feature of docker compose is insane.
formerly_proven 8 hours ago [-]
This was also part of the exploit chain in the "Volksdaten" incident.
0xbadcafebee 12 hours ago [-]
Or intentionally. There could be an APM agent which just lets you run heap dumps any time you want, or they enabled heap-dump-on-crash, or had a heap dump shutdown hook, etc. There's a lot of ways to trigger dumps. If we're talking about a full dump, and the apps were using most of the memory allocated to their container/VM/etc, 410GB is actually not that many dumps (we're probably talking uncompressed). At 4GB/dump, that's around 100, over possibly several years.
I just wonder where they were storing them all? At one place I worked, we jiggered up an auto shutdown dump that then automatically copied the compressed dump to an S3 bucket (it was an ephemeral container with no persistent storage). Wonder if they got in through excessive cloud storage policies and this was just the easiest way to exfiltrate data without full access to a DB.
kbouck 7 hours ago [-]
if a heap dump is a copy of all the bytes in memory, then wouldn't "thousands of heap dumps" likely be larger than 410GB?
napkin math:
410GB/1000 dumps = 410MB per dump?
410GB/2000 dumps = 205MB per dump
diggan 4 hours ago [-]
Might be filtered somewhat, like extracted all ASCII text then compile that into the dump, rather than just the raw dump files.
Edit: reading the description on the dump again, seems exactly what they did:
> Some of the archived data includes plaintext messages while other portions only include metadata, including sender and recipient information, timestamps, and group names. To facilitate research, Distributed Denial of Secrets has extracted the text from the original heap dumps.
TeleMessage CEO LinkedIn bio - reads like a terrible AI hatchet job:
"At the helm of TeleMessage, my leadership is defined by strategic innovation and a steadfast commitment to advancing telecommunications solutions. With a focus on SaaS products, our team has successfully navigated the industry's evolution, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of technological advancements. My role encompasses not only the oversight of our direction but also the cultivation of a culture that values ethical standards and collaborative success.
Our achievements are anchored in a proven track record of delivering results and solving complex problems with efficiency. Spearheading business development and marketing initiatives, we have established a reputation for excellence within the telecom sector. The acquisition of TeleMessage by Smarsh in 2024 stands as a testament to our team's dedication and my leadership in driving growth and fostering a united vision."
notpushkin 7 hours ago [-]
This just reads like a terrible LinkedIn-speak to me.
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
Sufficiently advanced human written linkedin-speak is indistinguishable from a barely coherent chatgpt 3.5 that's been instructed to speak in business buzzwords.
teekert 5 hours ago [-]
Hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing! I can imagine myself reading this 10 years ago and think: Wow this guy is on top of his CV game, how concise and elegant. But now, everybody has this ultra condensed LinkedIn speak, it has become so cringe, so meaningless.
CGMthrowaway 40 minutes ago [-]
Overly polished language, abstract phrasing, and a focus on generalities over specifics.
ulrikrasmussen 5 hours ago [-]
"I'm a CEO. We're SaaS. I'm a CEO."
greyface- 11 hours ago [-]
It's been weeks since the initial TeleMessage revelation... has the Signal Foundation responded in any way to the news? They condemn open source third-party clients and threaten trademark litigation when people use the "Signal" name in interop projects. Meanwhile, total silence when a defense contractor does the same thing.
ethersteeds 9 hours ago [-]
The charitable answer is that organizations across US society are currently all trying to be very still and quiet and not do anything to provoke a vindictive assault by this administration.
The less charitable one is that Moxie was the opinionated and uncompromising core of the Signal Foundation and has been removed from the board and completely vanished from the public eye. What it stands for now is a touch less clear.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 5 hours ago [-]
Meredith Whittaker seems kinda fearless though
decimalenough 7 hours ago [-]
Signal has done nothing wrong here. There's nothing they could meaningfully say that would do anything except draw heat from people looking for a scapegoat.
This mess is entirely the fault of Telemessage and the people who chose to use it for top-secret comms.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 7 hours ago [-]
Remember Signal FOSS fork that got cease and desisted?
How is Molly doing these days? Is there an alternative server you could selfhost?
asdffdasy 3 hours ago [-]
I'm annoyed by moxie vs fdroid as the next guy, but this is way above his desire to make a buck from his honest work.
this is about an overseas elite who profited from US war aid for decades holding the US presidency by the balls, and everyone think this is just incopetence.
think for a second, if any other administration was using a telephone or a communication software made by a never heard before company overseas, would you think it was just incompetence? why these traitors clowns get a pass?
th0ma5 11 hours ago [-]
You're making me wonder if Signal is the customer of the third party and not the government.
jfritsch1984 8 hours ago [-]
We‘re doing something way less critical at my job. But we have two pentests per year by external companies. How on earth is this level of incompetence even legal.
mmooss 8 hours ago [-]
Because software engineering is not taken seriously as engineering. What liability is there, for example?
namdnay 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think it was. Apparently they faked their SOC2 as well
eskibars 8 hours ago [-]
It's not
labadal 20 minutes ago [-]
I'm someone who is building a messaging app, and I make sure we subscribe to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" philosophy. But in our case it's collect nothing so there's no data to steal even if we get hacked.
namdnay 6 hours ago [-]
However bad their Signal fork was, at least it was legal. What's crazy is that this very company was also selling a cracked WhatsApp, which is a whole different kettle of fish... and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane
> and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane
Anedote: in Wall Street, Global Relay and TeleMessage are the major players when it comes to achieving communication for compliance.
asdffdasy 3 hours ago [-]
before that wallstreet ran on yahoo messenger! they only stopped because new yahoo brand owners didn't understood the value of this and shut it down because there weren't enough teens signing up.
WatchDog 10 hours ago [-]
Great example to use whenever legislators want to ban or add backdoors to e2e encryption.
willmarquis 10 hours ago [-]
Exposing unauthenticated /heapdump endpoints in production is a rookie mistake-especially for a service handling sensitive government comms. The presence of MD5 hashes and legacy tech like JSP just adds to the picture of poor security hygiene. This breach is a textbook case of why defense-in-depth and regular audits are non-negotiable.
Traubenfuchs 1 hours ago [-]
Don't hate on JSP.
Java Server Pages is now Jakarta Server Pages, part of Java EE (Jakarta EE) and it's latest version 11 was release just a year ago. Spring Framework 7 will be released by the end of 2025 and be based on it. Tomcat 11 is already based on it as well.
And all of this is based on the thriving Java ecosystem.
Version 12 is under development.
If they kept their stuff updated, nothing about this is legacy. It just declined in popularity.
You can build insecure trash and expose unprotected endpoints with next.js, or whatever is currently considered state of the art, as well.
0xbadcafebee 12 hours ago [-]
> Because the data is sensitive and full of PII, DDoSecrets is only sharing it with journalists and researchers.
Yeah I'm normally a big proponent of responsible disclosure, but in this case, I think the more painful, damaging leak is required.
Firstly, autocrats, fascists & oligarchs don't care that much if you hack them. They will just keep using these tools (or another one just like it) ignoring the correct procedure their government already wants them to use. The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions. Their incompetence put their nations at risk, and now it's clear they have failed to keep their intel safe. They have failed hard, let them fail hard.
Second, journalists and researchers have almost completely lost their power. In a non-democratic world (we're nearly there, just give them a little more time), when a journalist exposes corruption or incompetency, that journalist/researcher is simply silenced by the government. Silence the journalists and nobody knows what's going on so oppression can continue unchecked. Every person who gets silenced has a greater chilling effect on the whole society; nobody wants to be next. This is how authoritarians gain power. Oppression with no resistance or consequence legitimizes the oppression.
If we were just talking about typical corporate incompetence re: security, and the only thing at stake is a single stock or individuals' data, I would say disclose responsibly. But when it comes to stopping autocracy, the gloves have to come off. They sure as shit aren't gonna play by any rules, so neither should we.
CobrastanJorji 11 hours ago [-]
> The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions.
This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have to get Americans to really feel the pain, and to do that I need to <horrible violence> to them to wake them up and make them see how things are bad."
Hurting people in order to make them see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.
fumeux_fume 11 hours ago [-]
This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have lie and cover up the truth of the <horrible violence> being done to them so they'll never see how bad things have gotten."
Lying to people in order to make them never see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.
Yizahi 3 hours ago [-]
If we really think about the issue, then it is clear that 99.99% of the government information can be public with zero consequences to the citizens. I'm guessing the only few exceptions are active military ops, active spy ops and ways to access secure systems (passwords etc.). Everything else is more or less safe. Embarrassing to the politicians, but safe.
scheeseman486 11 hours ago [-]
You're describing accelerationism and while the ethics behind it are iffy at best, history contends that it does work to help spur revolution.
rtpg 9 hours ago [-]
I feel like it's valuable to not flatten the context here. We are talking about leaking texts by the Trump admin (and I guess some law enforcement agencies using this?).
There is a lot of daylight between dropping a bunch of texts for government officials and committing horrible violence against people as a whole! These are not the same thing! One could be good/fine while the other is bad!
Having said that I would worry for a WikiLeaks-style "oh now this random person's info is out there because it was in one of these e-mails".
I just want to see the gossip
oivey 10 hours ago [-]
That quote does not say anything about citizens inflicting pain on others. That’s such a strange way to read it. It’s saying to vote shitty leaders out. I’m not sure what you think any other possible alternative there could be.
TechDebtDevin 9 hours ago [-]
What if you're hurting people to prevent them from hurting people...
3036e4 9 hours ago [-]
They don't need to "silence journalists", since a large number of people were duped to think real truth comes from random anonymous accounts on social media or from some charismatic political influencer they follow. It doesn't matter what leaks are exposed when it can just be handwaved as "fake news" and enough voters will buy that.
Ray20 7 hours ago [-]
>It doesn't matter what leaks are exposed when it can just be handwaved as "fake news" and enough voters will buy that.
Especially in conditions when you don't have to lie at that.
It's not because voters are so gullible that they are ready to believe any word of a charismatic leader. The loss of trust to the mainstream media and to the scientific community is a natural phenomenon in environment when they only tell lies to push their political agenda.
afavour 10 hours ago [-]
> The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions.
The consequences likely wouldn’t be felt by those leaders though. Who knows what info is in those logs about informants, agents etc etc. Leak it openly and they’re dead.
The national broadcaster picked 2 things to report on, then gave the rest of it back to the government.
The act of helping cover this shit up likely changed the course of politics in this country for decades. Theres likely stuff in that cabinet that was well in the public interest and needed disclosure.
Signalgate or whatever is likely the same. And I dont care which party it harms or whatever. It seems relevant that people should have more information, not less considering everything that is happening.
landl0rd 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mschoch 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bigbacaloa 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
udev4096 7 hours ago [-]
The title is outright wrong and should be criticized for spreading false information. They have NOT published anything, it's only for "researchers", which is a way of saying "we will write false title of this article just so we can get a lot of attention"
Yizahi 3 hours ago [-]
I love when politicians, lobbying for the backdooring all communication software are getting pwned in the same way. Too bad they lack either brain cells or basic human empathy to make a connection between these events.
diggan 3 hours ago [-]
> Too bad they lack either brain cells or basic human empathy to make a connection between these events.
I think that's giving them too much benefits. They know what they're doing, it's clear they want "security for me, but not for you", and claiming they're too dumb to know exactly what they're doing is playing it exactly like how they want it.
Yizahi 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that the "lacking empathy part". Most of them are sociopaths and psychopaths, in the medical sense. They only want power for themselves at any cost to others.
halfmatthalfcat 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it’s that extreme. They probably view themselves as the arbiters of society and are inherently granted more privilege than a normal citizen. Paternalistic more than sociopathic. Issue is our parents, while have the benefit of experience, don’t know shit about shit really. Especially when it comes to tech.
runlevel1 9 hours ago [-]
"clean on OPSEC"
- Pete Hegseth
That line simultaneously becomes funnier and more depressing.
nlitsme 7 hours ago [-]
I think this is abuse of the word 'publish'
pawanjswal 8 hours ago [-]
Wow, this whole TeleMessage leak feels like a spy thriller.
asdffdasy 3 hours ago [-]
if you get your spy thrillers from Mexican day time tv soap opera script writers, yes.
halfmatthalfcat 1 hours ago [-]
Telenovella about spy’s? Sign me up.
bob_theslob646 11 hours ago [-]
Isn't it against the law in the United States to use outside channels for government communications? Wasn't this the whole scandal about Clinton? Please correct me if I am wrong.
afavour 10 hours ago [-]
Amazingly the app is on the governments list of approved apps. The scandal is what they’re discussing on there: highly sensitive information you normally go to very secure channels to talk about.
rtpg 9 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that it was added fairly recently at that, and already this has happened. This must be a record time in "change of policy leading to the most embarassing result". Only a couple of months!
FerretFred 55 minutes ago [-]
Based on pure guesswork I'd say that you higher up the person, the less the rules apply.
floam 10 hours ago [-]
The app exists to comply with the regulations, was my understanding.
10 hours ago [-]
zombiwoof 9 hours ago [-]
If no one will persecute criminals they will keep breaking all laws
goalieca 11 hours ago [-]
Security standards need to start banning heap dumps.
GuinansEyebrows 11 hours ago [-]
Something tells me that wouldn’t make a huge difference in some of these companies opsec.
9 hours ago [-]
sneak 10 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure they already do, especially endpoints open to the whole internet that are unauthenticated.
lionkor 8 hours ago [-]
If only there was a rule saying "don't do that, this would not have happened
treebeard901 8 hours ago [-]
"We are currently clean on OPSEC"
CyberMacGyver 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
greyface- 12 hours ago [-]
I don't disagree generally, but it should be noted that the TeleMessage federal contracts predate this administration.
> According to Padgett and government records reviewed by NBC News, government contracts (some of which are still current) involving TeleMessage go back years, predating the current Trump administration. One current contract that mentions TeleMessage allocated $2.1 million from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA for “TELEMESSAGE MOBILE ELECTRONIC MESSAGE ARCHIVING,” beginning in February 2023, with an August 2025 end date.
Sure, but was it being used to send secure military messages in the past? Or was it being used as a slightly more secure text messaging replacement by agencies that weren’t subject to the same security requirements as the Secretary of Defense?
mikem170 12 hours ago [-]
It is my understanding that the normal procedures mandate that government supplied locked down devices be used for classified communications, not personal phones running Israeli cloud-connected messaging apps.
This is comparable to everyone using Hillary's email server for classified messaging, except also controlled in a foreign country, and oops very insecure.
Even office drones working at a bank aren't allowed to do such things.
This is not normal.
timewizard 12 hours ago [-]
> but was it being used to send secure military messages in the past?
We have no information on that one way or the other.
> a slightly more secure text messaging replacement
Yea but it wasn't secure at all. For any purpose.
> that weren’t subject to the same security requirements as the Secretary of Defense?
Regardless of who is using it and for what purpose I'd like the server to actually be secure.
This isn't a left vs. right issue. This is an overall government incompetence issue.
King-Aaron 12 hours ago [-]
I find it interesting that so many people are still treating this administration as if they are acting in good faith about anything.
They don't just seem to be incompetent, they seem to be wilfully negligent.
BrenBarn 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
11 hours ago [-]
hiddencost 11 hours ago [-]
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readthenotes1 11 hours ago [-]
You and lots of others. Same fear my MAGA relatives had after the 2020 vote.
I have confidence that there will be a vote in 2028 and whoever is elected will take over in 2029.
loeg 11 hours ago [-]
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limejuicedrop 8 hours ago [-]
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yieldcrv 11 hours ago [-]
beautiful, any prediction markets tied to this? I need to stop betting on those things, I’m so bad at it
guluarte 11 hours ago [-]
cannot the pentagon with their billions in funding make a secure app?
hn_throwaway_99 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, and they do. The fact that the leaders of our present kakistocracy don't use it should not be an indictment of the civil and military workers in the US military.
sneak 10 hours ago [-]
No, the fact that they still work for the US government given “our present kakistocracy” is a sufficient indictment.
pigbearpig 11 hours ago [-]
Not when "off the shelf" is the motto. They'd still have to outsource the development and at that point would be questioned why spending that much money when Telemessage sells the product.
Unfortunately, the financial structure doesn't really make it easy for custom DoD software.
TechDebtDevin 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah no thanks, not donating to gate keepers who want to maintain the status quo. I'll give my coin to wiki leaks and groups with balls.
This group didn’t really “publish” anything, though. They’re offering access to journalists through a request form. They’re also not saying how much actual message content they have because the 410GB of heap dumps makes for a bigger headline number.
And charging for it?!
I’m not sure what is more embarrassing: to be the company or to be a user.
If you want to keep the branding of Signal being the secure app, you need to make sure that all Signal users are actually using a secure version of Signal.
If an insecure fork (like this one) becomes too popular, most groups will have at least one member using it, and then the security is gone.
Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
How does this make sense? If they were gathering data, why would they add a public download? Surely the Israeli officials would not want foreign powers to access this?
Per Hanlon's razor, I don't think this is attributable to anything other than incompetence.
So the heapdumps being available is a Spring Boot feature so it does not appear to be malicious.
Which does not bode well for the customers' counter intelligence abilities
But why would they? It's not their job. They have massive IT staff supporting them. "High level U.S. officials" are just executives; the pointy-haired bosses to the pointy-haired boss. Only difference is these wear little decorative pins over their breast pocket.
Every Fortune 500 company has dedicated IT staff for execs; someone you can call 24/7 and say "my shit's broke" and they respond "we just overnighted you a new phone".
These people couldn't even install an app on their MDM-controlled device, now the narrative has become we expect them to be making low-level IT decisions too?
Next week we'll be scrutinizing Pete Hegseth's lack of thoughts on rotating backup tapes.
I think that's a misdirection.
The narrative is that:
a) they were using a compromised piece of software
b) they should not have been using that software - not (necessarily) because it was compromised, but because it wasn't US DoD accredited for that use case.
(I understand your point that these guys are not tech savvy, and do not need to be, but they should be regulation-savvy (clearly they either are not, or willingly broke those regulations), and they should be following organisational guidelines that presumably cover the selection and use of these tools types.)
If their staff makes bad decisions, that’s their failure too.
We expect them to be ultimately responsible for what happens on their watch.
Was it Truman who said, “Woah, don’t bring the buck anywhere near me, it stops with my assistant”.
Yes, there's a fleet of people who are supposed to make such tech decisions. The people involved specifically went against those rules. The existence of a group chat using an authorised app is a violation on its own, adding a journalist to it is a violation on top of a violation.
Adding a journalist was accidental, but using such an app (despite it not being approved) is very intentional.
This is typical for highly corrupt governments and autocracies, they crumble from within because the autocrats can't trust random, competent people so their inner circle becomes saturated with people who are selected on the basis of loyalty not competence, and these people end up making the most important decisions and running the country.
I assume he did and they said it was a bad idea - the memo they'd released a few weeks prior about Signal vulnerabilities seems to suggest a lack of faith in that approach - but he was already banging away on his phone with all the grocery reminders and definitely not battle plans he needs to keep pushing out. Which is also how it feels in the enterprise space these days.
Strange thing to see our bureaucracy start to behave like a corporation instead of the other way around.
They could have used user-custody public key cryptography, where the end devices have the pubkey of the customer, and archive only re-encrypted messages to TM that they can’t read.
That is not, of course, what they did. They just archive them in plaintext.
I haven't used WhatsApp for 'a very long time' as I have exited the FB ecosystem, but back in the day I remember seeing "lite" or "WhatsApp+" or other variations of the software. I wouldn't be surprised that those "lite" or "+" come with baggage.
That's very important to say. I went through one of these massive data dumps recently and it was literally all cached operating system package updates and routine logs. Nothing at all of interest.
It's easy to cut the size on a heap dump. When it's not done it seems sketchy. But it could be a 512GB dump and already pruned, so I could be wrong.
I hope the message dump is juicy.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/ftx-bankr...
Big presumption.
If I were israeli, there’s no way in hell anybody with half a brain would want me near their spy agency.
When a gov is committing a genocide, their decisions are based on control and fear, not getting the best out of people.
Edit: downvote all you want. Israel is still committing a genocide. No hospitals left standing. Killing aid workers, journalists, and doctors. A million people on the brink of starvation. Literally salting the earth to prevent crops from being grown. That is war crimes, ghettoization, and genocide.
The US only has voluntary military service, so the dynamics are different
It’s especially true for spooks of a certain entity. Also, it’s easy to confuse brazenness, being protected from consequences, and usually downplayed or secret Western complicity with competence.
This is a country of 10 million people, a rather heterogeneous one at that. There are going to be better and worse companies.
Working with a few companies like these, I can tell you that the marketing is top-notch, and very aggressive. The products not so. Most get better with time.
"Spring Boot Actuator. “Up until version 1.5 (released in 2017), the /heapdump endpoint was configured as publicly exposed and accessible without authentication by default."
I just wonder where they were storing them all? At one place I worked, we jiggered up an auto shutdown dump that then automatically copied the compressed dump to an S3 bucket (it was an ephemeral container with no persistent storage). Wonder if they got in through excessive cloud storage policies and this was just the easiest way to exfiltrate data without full access to a DB.
napkin math:
Edit: reading the description on the dump again, seems exactly what they did:
> Some of the archived data includes plaintext messages while other portions only include metadata, including sender and recipient information, timestamps, and group names. To facilitate research, Distributed Denial of Secrets has extracted the text from the original heap dumps.
https://ddosecrets.com/article/telemessage
"At the helm of TeleMessage, my leadership is defined by strategic innovation and a steadfast commitment to advancing telecommunications solutions. With a focus on SaaS products, our team has successfully navigated the industry's evolution, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of technological advancements. My role encompasses not only the oversight of our direction but also the cultivation of a culture that values ethical standards and collaborative success.
Our achievements are anchored in a proven track record of delivering results and solving complex problems with efficiency. Spearheading business development and marketing initiatives, we have established a reputation for excellence within the telecom sector. The acquisition of TeleMessage by Smarsh in 2024 stands as a testament to our team's dedication and my leadership in driving growth and fostering a united vision."
The less charitable one is that Moxie was the opinionated and uncompromising core of the Signal Foundation and has been removed from the board and completely vanished from the public eye. What it stands for now is a touch less clear.
This mess is entirely the fault of Telemessage and the people who chose to use it for top-secret comms.
How is Molly doing these days? Is there an alternative server you could selfhost?
this is about an overseas elite who profited from US war aid for decades holding the US presidency by the balls, and everyone think this is just incopetence.
think for a second, if any other administration was using a telephone or a communication software made by a never heard before company overseas, would you think it was just incompetence? why these traitors clowns get a pass?
https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...
Anedote: in Wall Street, Global Relay and TeleMessage are the major players when it comes to achieving communication for compliance.
Java Server Pages is now Jakarta Server Pages, part of Java EE (Jakarta EE) and it's latest version 11 was release just a year ago. Spring Framework 7 will be released by the end of 2025 and be based on it. Tomcat 11 is already based on it as well.
And all of this is based on the thriving Java ecosystem.
Version 12 is under development.
If they kept their stuff updated, nothing about this is legacy. It just declined in popularity.
You can build insecure trash and expose unprotected endpoints with next.js, or whatever is currently considered state of the art, as well.
Yeah I'm normally a big proponent of responsible disclosure, but in this case, I think the more painful, damaging leak is required.
Firstly, autocrats, fascists & oligarchs don't care that much if you hack them. They will just keep using these tools (or another one just like it) ignoring the correct procedure their government already wants them to use. The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions. Their incompetence put their nations at risk, and now it's clear they have failed to keep their intel safe. They have failed hard, let them fail hard.
Second, journalists and researchers have almost completely lost their power. In a non-democratic world (we're nearly there, just give them a little more time), when a journalist exposes corruption or incompetency, that journalist/researcher is simply silenced by the government. Silence the journalists and nobody knows what's going on so oppression can continue unchecked. Every person who gets silenced has a greater chilling effect on the whole society; nobody wants to be next. This is how authoritarians gain power. Oppression with no resistance or consequence legitimizes the oppression.
If we were just talking about typical corporate incompetence re: security, and the only thing at stake is a single stock or individuals' data, I would say disclose responsibly. But when it comes to stopping autocracy, the gloves have to come off. They sure as shit aren't gonna play by any rules, so neither should we.
This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have to get Americans to really feel the pain, and to do that I need to <horrible violence> to them to wake them up and make them see how things are bad."
Hurting people in order to make them see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.
Lying to people in order to make them never see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.
There is a lot of daylight between dropping a bunch of texts for government officials and committing horrible violence against people as a whole! These are not the same thing! One could be good/fine while the other is bad!
Having said that I would worry for a WikiLeaks-style "oh now this random person's info is out there because it was in one of these e-mails".
I just want to see the gossip
Especially in conditions when you don't have to lie at that.
It's not because voters are so gullible that they are ready to believe any word of a charismatic leader. The loss of trust to the mainstream media and to the scientific community is a natural phenomenon in environment when they only tell lies to push their political agenda.
The consequences likely wouldn’t be felt by those leaders though. Who knows what info is in those logs about informants, agents etc etc. Leak it openly and they’re dead.
We had the Cabinet Leaks in Aus https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-31/cabinet-files-reveal-...
The national broadcaster picked 2 things to report on, then gave the rest of it back to the government.
The act of helping cover this shit up likely changed the course of politics in this country for decades. Theres likely stuff in that cabinet that was well in the public interest and needed disclosure.
Signalgate or whatever is likely the same. And I dont care which party it harms or whatever. It seems relevant that people should have more information, not less considering everything that is happening.
I think that's giving them too much benefits. They know what they're doing, it's clear they want "security for me, but not for you", and claiming they're too dumb to know exactly what they're doing is playing it exactly like how they want it.
- Pete Hegseth
That line simultaneously becomes funnier and more depressing.
> According to Padgett and government records reviewed by NBC News, government contracts (some of which are still current) involving TeleMessage go back years, predating the current Trump administration. One current contract that mentions TeleMessage allocated $2.1 million from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA for “TELEMESSAGE MOBILE ELECTRONIC MESSAGE ARCHIVING,” beginning in February 2023, with an August 2025 end date.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/photo-appears-shows-mi...
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70FA3123F00000028...
This is comparable to everyone using Hillary's email server for classified messaging, except also controlled in a foreign country, and oops very insecure.
Even office drones working at a bank aren't allowed to do such things.
This is not normal.
We have no information on that one way or the other.
> a slightly more secure text messaging replacement
Yea but it wasn't secure at all. For any purpose.
> that weren’t subject to the same security requirements as the Secretary of Defense?
Regardless of who is using it and for what purpose I'd like the server to actually be secure.
This isn't a left vs. right issue. This is an overall government incompetence issue.
They don't just seem to be incompetent, they seem to be wilfully negligent.
I have confidence that there will be a vote in 2028 and whoever is elected will take over in 2029.
Unfortunately, the financial structure doesn't really make it easy for custom DoD software.
Is this group not very seriously discredited, with ties to FBI, convicted child porn criminals, etc? Or am I getting something mixed up?
This could still be a legitimate leak, of course. I'm just wondering if this info is publically known, or if I'm conflating things