A hacker who breached the communications service used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month intercepted messages from a broader swath of American officials than has previously been reported, according to a Reuters review, potentially raising the stakes of a breach that has already drawn questions about data security in the Trump administration.

Reuters identified more than 60 unique government users of the messaging platform TeleMessage in a cache of leaked data provided by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a US nonprofit whose stated mission is to archive hacked and leaked documents in the public interest.

The trove included material from disaster responders, customs officials, several US diplomatic staffers, at least one White House staffer and members of the Secret Service. The messages reviewed by Reuters covered a roughly daylong period of time ending on May 4, and many of them were fragmentary.

Once little known outside government and finance circles, the Israel-founded TeleMessage drew media attention after an April 30 Reuters photograph showed Waltz checking TeleMessage’s version of the privacy-focused app Signal during a cabinet meeting.

While Reuters could not verify the entire contents of the TeleMessage trove, in more than half a dozen cases the news agency was able to establish that the phone numbers in the leaked data were correctly attributed to their owners. One of the intercepted texts’ recipients — an applicant for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — confirmed to Reuters that the leaked message was authentic; a financial services........

© The Times of Israel