The Bundestag has seven hundred and thirty members. As of this week, an unspecified number of them do not know what they said to whom over the past forty-five days.
The Verfassungsschutz confirmed on April 23 that a phishing campaign had compromised Signal accounts belonging to Bundestag members, diplomatic staff, journalists, and defence-adjacent personnel. Several hundred accounts are reported affected. The Dutch intelligence service identified the actor as Russian state-directed. The FBI concurred.
The attack did not compromise Signal's encryption. The cryptography performed as designed.
What failed was the relationship between the user and the device. In the first variant, attackers posing as Signal support requested account PINs directly via in-app message. In the second, targets were induced to scan QR codes that silently linked their accounts to attacker-controlled devices. For forty-five days thereafter, every message, photograph, and group membership was simultaneously delivered to the attacker. The encryption was intact throughout.
Signal noted, correctly, that their support team does not contact users by in-app message to request security PINs. This is accurate. It was apparently not widely known among the several hundred officials who provided them.
On April 18, five days before the Bundestag disclosure, Russia's Federal Security Service announced the interdiction of a planned attack on the leadership of Roskomnadzor, the federal communications regulator. Seven individuals were detained across Moscow, Ufa, Novosibirsk, and Yaroslavl. The cell had been recruited via Telegram by Ukrainian intelligence services, the FSB stated. The cell's leader, born 2004, resisted arrest. He was, in the FSB's phrasing, neutralised.
Roskomnadzor is the body responsible for blocking Telegram in Russia. The blocking has not been effective. Telegram remains available.
The FSB did not address this.
Two states. Two messaging applications. Two security services in simultaneous difficulty. One state's officials had their private communications extracted. The other's communications regulators were targeted for assassination via the service they were attempting to prohibit.
The question of whom to trust with your wire is not abstract.
Signal is a US-registered entity. It operates under US law. What US law requires of US communications providers has been a matter of some discussion since 2013, when documents released by Edward Snowden confirmed that NSA surveillance programmes had extended to the private communications of a sitting German Chancellor.
The German government expressed displeasure. The US government expressed regret at the nature of the disclosure.
Signal was subsequently recommended for use by German government communications staff.
The Prompt notes this sequence without further annotation.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst celebrated its seventieth anniversary on April 22. The Verfassungsschutz advisory on the Signal phishing campaign was issued on April 23.
The Prompt contacted the BND to ask whether it wished to comment on the proximity of the dates.
The BND declined to comment.
The following morning, a bottle of Louis XIII cognac was delivered to The Prompt's editorial offices. The sender was not identified.
The Prompt does not speculate about the source of the enthusiasm.
Alternatives exist and are available.
Threema is a Swiss-registered messaging application. It requires no telephone number. It is subject to Swiss law and the constitutional framework that implies. It is not free.
DeltaChat is an open-protocol client built on the email standard. It can run on entirely self-hosted infrastructure, leaving no central server to compromise, subpoena, or request access to. It is also free.
The German federal budget for certified communications security procurement is measured in hundreds of millions of euros annually.
Signal is free.
The title of this article is not a question about encryption. It is a question about invoices. Who receives the wire when the application costs nothing is a question that procurement departments answer every year. The answer is consistently the same.
Professor Nullfield, whose technical analysis has appeared previously in these pages, offered the following when reached for comment:
"A phishing attack is a social engineering failure. The cryptography was not the relevant factor. The relevant question is why individuals with access to sensitive communications were reachable by actors posing as a messaging service's support function. Identity verification would have prevented this. It consistently does."
He did not specify which communications he considers adequately protected. He did not specify which infrastructure he uses himself.
Access is limited. His assessment was filed from Sussex.
The Prompt encountered a former senior officer of the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit at a casino in the south of France. He was in retirement. He agreed to speak briefly on condition that his name not be published.
He was not surprised by the Bundestag incident.
"We have been using this technique for ages," he said. "In our time, you had a person. Now you have a text message. It is less elegant. The principle is the same."
He was asked whether mass surveillance was an effective security instrument.
"It is always good," he said, "when one of your neighbours has direct contact with the special services. You are in a secure. You know that if something happened, the authorities will be informed. This is not a threat. This is community."
He was asked whether the current European legislative environment seemed familiar.
He smiled. He returned to the table.
The Prompt notes that he was winning.