“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind-boggling to me that all of these senior folks who were on this line and nobody bothered to even check, security hygiene 101, who are all the names? Who are they?” US senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said during Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
According to The Atlantic, 12 Trump administration officials were in the Signal group chat, including vice president JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and Trump adviser Susie Wiles. Jabbour adds that even with decisionmaking authorities present and participating in a communication, establishing an information designation or declassifying information happens through an established, proactive process. As he puts it, “If you spill milk on the floor, you can’t just say, ‘That’s actually not spilled milk, because I intended to spill it.’”
All of which is to say, SignalGate raises plenty of security, privacy, and legal issues. But the security of Signal itself is not one of them. Despite that, in the wake of The Atlantic’s story on Monday, some have sought tenuous connections between the Trump cabinet’s security breach and Signal vulnerabilities. On Tuesday, for example, a Pentagon adviser echoed a report from Google’s security researchers, who alerted Signal earlier this year to a phishing technique that Russian military intelligence used to target the app’s users in Ukraine. But Signal pushed out an update to make that tactic—which tricks users into adding a hacker as a secondary device on their account—far harder to pull off, and the same tactic also targeted some accounts on the messaging services WhatsApp and Telegram.
“Phishing attacks against people using popular applications and websites are a fact of life on the internet,” Signal spokesperson Jun Harada tells WIRED. “Once we learned that Signal users were being targeted, and how they were being targeted, we introduced additional safeguards and in-app warnings to help protect people from falling victim to phishing attacks. This work was completed months ago.”
In fact, says White, the cryptography researcher, if the Trump administration is going to put secret communications at risk by discussing war plans on unapproved commercial devices and freely available messaging apps, they could have done much worse than to choose Signal for those conversations, given its reputation and track record among security experts.
“Signal is the consensus recommendation for highly at-risk communities—human rights activists, attorneys, and confidential sources for journalists,” says White. Just not, as this week has made clear, executive branch officials planning airstrikes.
Updated at 5:50 pm ET, March 25, 2025: Added remarks about Signal by President Trump.
