When Trump Trump Assistant sends a signal, flight data shows members of the group chat in Russia

President Trump’s Ukrainian and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow when he met Russian President Vladimir Putin Included in group chat On the messaging app Signal, more than a dozen other senior government officials and a reporter accidentally revealed CBS news analysis of open source flight information and reports from Russian media.

Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise signals, a popular platform for business news, and many have been shocked to learn from senior Trump administration officials who have used to discuss sensitive military plans.

According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, Witkoff arrived in Moscow shortly after noon on March 13, and Russian media broadcast videos left Vnukovo International Airport shortly after. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of Atlantic Magazine, about 12 hours later, he was added to the “Houthi PC Group” chat on the signal to discuss military operations against Hotis, Yemen.

U.S. lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, have questioned the use of commercial communication platforms for dialogue, Goldberg revealed in his own Atlantic report on Monday.

The National Security Council told CBS News on Monday that the group chat “seems to be real.”

Goldberg has narrated that Witkoff made any comments in a group chat until Saturday when he left Russia and returned to the United States and stopped in Baku, Azerbaijan on Friday. It is not clear whether the signal chat contains a call from a U.S. government or personal device to Witkoff or whether it is used with him in Russia, but U.S. officials are reluctant to use messaging applications on government devices, including the Department of Defense.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized the Atlantic report on Tuesday and said on X that there was no discussion of “the war plan” and no naming signals, adding that the White House lawyers’ office “provides many different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and effectively as possible.”

Two members of the group’s chat, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, appeared on the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday Pre-planned hearings About global security threats. Ratcliffe admitted Tuesday that he was part of the chat.

Goldberg reported that in a panel discussion about the signal, Ratcliff appointed an active CIA intelligence officer in a chat at 5:24 pm ET, after midnight in Russia. Witkoff’s flight did not leave Moscow until around 2 a.m. local time, while former Putin adviser Sergei Markov remained close to the Russian president.

Neither the Kremlin nor the White House confirmed the timing of Vidokoff’s meeting with Putin. The White House did not immediately answer questions about CBS News about the meeting, or whether Witkoff had his equipment in the Kremlin.

The signal has a good reputation for security, partly because it is built on open source code, so vulnerabilities can be checked, Neil Ashdown, a consultant working in cybersecurity, told CBS News.

Ashdon said that considering whether the platform is safe, “is to miss out on the crux of the problem, which is to question whether using the application to convey that information level in that environment is in line with the level of strategy and process, and if not, that would be a problem.”

Signal applications provide end-to-end encryption, which means that no one except the sender and receiver can read messages sent on the platform. However, such encryption is not unacceptable, with Google Threat Intelligence Group only warning last month: “The efforts of a growing number of Russian states to compromise the signal of signals used by individuals in Russian intelligence services.”

Ukraine’s top cyber defense agency warned last week that targeted attacks prompted signal accounts to be compromised, sending malware to employees of defense industry companies and members of Ukrainian armed forces. An announcement released by the Ukraine Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) on March 18 indicated that the attack began this month’s attack, signal messages containing links to archived messages, disguised as meeting reports. According to the memo, some messages are sent from existing contacts, increasing the possibility of opening a phishing link.

Some ways to hijack a smartphone don’t even require direct access to the device, Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity consultant at software and cybersecurity company ESET, told CBS News.

One of the most famous cyber threats in the past decade is Pegasus, a spyware developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, which is said to be For targeting journalists and activists. Moore explains that Pegasus is designed to be installed remotely on a mobile device, and then can control the camera, messaging app, microphone and even the screen itself without the user even knowing it has been installed.

Moore said in practice that despite the sensitive communications of secure government communication channels, choosing this method of communication “is usually dependent on a balance of convenience and security.”

Although the risk is minimal for members of the public, he said: “The safer these conversations, or more sensitive they are, you have to increase the inconvenience because safety has to be crucial.”

Nicole Sganga contributed to the report.