The institution is taking the recent spate of attacks seriously, holding comprehensive cybersecurity assessments and regularly replacing officials’ phones and devices, two Commission officials said.
The Commission is investigating a cyberattack on its websites, with early findings suggesting some data was stolen, the institution said Friday. In January the Commission said it had found evidence of a cyberattack on the technical infrastructure it uses to manage its mobile devices, which “may have resulted” in hackers gaining access to staff names and mobile numbers.
Hacking and Signal vulnerability is an issue not just for the Commission. Intelligence services in the Netherlands warned last month of a “large-scale global cyber campaign,” in which hackers from the Kremlin posed as a fake Signal support chatbot to trick officials into revealing their app PIN codes. French, German, Portuguese and British security services issued similar alerts.
“The best option you have right now is Signal, Threema, and after that, to a certain degree, WhatsApp,” said Herpig of Interface. Threema is a Swiss-developed encrypted messaging app.
Signal and WhatsApp lack features required for government comms, said Matthew Hodgson, chief executive of Element, a company that built tech used by multiple European governments for secure messaging apps. “You can’t kick somebody out of a WhatsApp group if they get fired from the government. You have no single sign-on, no authentication access control … you have a single point of failure.”
The use of Signal by government officials drew a spotlight last year after the editor-in-chief of U.S. magazine The Atlantic was accidentally added to a Signal group chat containing some of the most senior members of the U.S. government, including Vice President JD Vance, in which they discussed detailed military plans — in a breach of security dubbed Signalgate. The episode highlighted the extent to which commercial messaging apps have become embedded in government operations.
Koen Verhelst contributed reporting.
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