As Top Officials Were Messaging a Group Text About Bomb Plans, Their Passwords Were Leaked Online

We're on week two of the fallout from the Signal group chat scandal — and apparently, there's a lot more where that came from. Reporters at Germany's Der Spiegel have, as the newspaper reported, uncovered private contact information for defense secretary Pete Hegseth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Donald Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz — the same guy who added The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to that damningly insecure groupchat where plans to bomb Yemen were discussed. Though Spiegel newspaper didn't publish any of the information, its reporting indicates that their phone numbers, emails, and even some of their passwords were pretty easy to find. And they didn't have to go particularly deep, either: the reporters used a popular "people search" engine — they didn't identify which, but PeopleFinders.com is a big name in that shady game — and leaked password databases. As the paper notes, Hegseth's data was by far the easiest to acces ... Read full article.