Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should stop using the Signal messaging app at this point.
The Washington Post reports that the former Fox News host had Signal installed on his office computer at the Pentagon, a major security risk and further evidence that Hegseth used the messaging tool frequently for government business. According to the Post, the desktop app mirrored Hegseth’s phone and helped the secretary overcome the lack of cell phone service within the Pentagon.
Cell phones and other personal electronic devices are not permitted within classified spaces, and installing Signal on his desktop computer allowed Hegseth to get around that prohibition. At least one of Hegseth’s top aides, his chief of staff Joe Kasper, also expressed interest in using Signal on Department of Defense computers, but it’s not clear how widespread the app is among Pentagon employees.
I wonder who has privileges to install apps on office PCs in the military. Does every high level appointee have the ability to install any app the find online.
Gotta love user-mode installers… let alone portable apps.
You can still block it. It’s literally secops 101…any EDR worth a fuck can do this.
The issue is…the people running this shit show, usual are bottom of the barrel because those who know what the fuck their doing go private because it actually pays what they’re worth.
I’ve worked with plenty who come out of the 3 letter agencies and they’re usually ignorant to the real world.
Everything is so fuckin Silo’d nobody knows a damn thing. I can’t wait to not be in fed IT so i can actually learn things that are worth a damn, and not be held down by the unwillingness of the government to use modern tools.
I was wondering why the traffic wasn’t blocked too.
God i hate these things. And that windows is set up to allow it.
None of that shit gets patched, ever, it just sits in Appdata and rots.
To be fair, a lot of Linux apps also do similar things and ~/.local is a similar swamp.
I suppose. I would have assumed that the pentagon would have methods that nerf the user to only install preaproved apps.