TeleMessage app used by Mike Waltz suspends service over suspected hack

The communications app used by Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, says it is temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its potentially sensitive messages.

Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said in an email to Reuters that it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution”.

A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

Waltz was ousted the following day and Trump named his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to take on Waltz’s job on an interim basis. At the same time, Trump said he would nominate Waltz to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.

The move capped weeks of controversy over Waltz’s creation of a Signal group to share real-time updates on US military action in Yemen. That chat drew particular attention because Waltz, or someone using his account, accidentally added a prominent US journalist to the group.

Concerns over the security of Waltz’s communications were further heightened, when it was reported on Sunday that a hacker had broken into TeleMessage’s back-end infrastructure and intercepted some of its users’ messages.

Tech news site 404 Media said the hacker provided them with stolen material, some of which the news site was able to independently verify.

Smarsh did not immediately respond to a request by Reuters for more detail about the breach.

Reuters contributed to this report