Now that everyone uses the same communications technologies, security vulnerabilities are amplified.
By Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
March 28, 2025, 3:14 PM
... “I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. “Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out.”
Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a report from CBS News that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had sent out a bulletin to its employees last month warning them about a security “vulnerability” identified in Signal.
The truth, however, is much more interesting. If Signal has vulnerabilities, then China, Russia, and other U.S. adversaries suddenly have a new incentive to discover them. At the same time, the NSA urgently needs to find and fix any vulnerabilities quickly as it can—and similarly, ensure that commercial smartphones are free of backdoors—access points that allow people other than a smartphone’s user to bypass the usual security authentication methods to access the device’s contents ...
It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks ... But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect U.S. communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans ...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/28/signal-chat-leak-trump-technology-security-houthis-group-defense-nsa/
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