The inside story of the Telemessage saga, and how you can view the data

DEF CON On Saturday at DEF CON, security boffin Micah Lee explained just how he hacked into TeleMessage, the supposedly secure messaging app used by White House officials, which in turn led to a massive database dump of their communications.

As possibly the most secure end-to-end encrypted messaging app, Signal is used by everyone from security-conscious journalists to the former White House national security adviser Mike Waltz - although as we saw in the Signalgate saga no security systems can save one from stupidity like adding a journalist to your chat.

Shortly after the Signalgate fiasco, a canny photographer spotted Waltz was using a Signal clone, TeleMessage, which backed up messages to a server, reportedly intended to comply with the US Federal Records Act. Lee decided to investigate and explained to The Register how he managed to crack the system and put a 410GB database of messages online.

"I analyzed the ...