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Banks Fined $549 Million for Using iMessage and Signal to Hide Business Communications

Oğuz Çakır — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 09:44:35 +0000

Apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal have become essential in our lives. We like them not just because they’re easy to use and popular, but also because they’re secure and can’t be easily monitored from the outside. But sometimes, privacy might not always be a good thing, especially when used by bank managers. Several US financial companies are being fined a total of $549 million because they couldn’t show company chats from apps like iMessage and Signal. Here are the details…

Banks fined $549 million for hiding messages in iMessage and Signal

Several US financial firms, including Wells Fargo, have been fined $549 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for using encrypted messaging apps like Signal and iMessage to hide messages about company business. The SEC found that the firms failed to preserve these messages as required by law, which could have prevented regulators from investigating potential wrongdoing.

The SEC’s investigation began in 2019, after a whistleblower reported that some financial company employees were using encrypted messaging apps to discuss sensitive topics, such as regulatory compliance and customer complaints. The SEC’s investigation found that Wells Fargo employees used iMessage and Signal to send and receive messages about a variety of topics, including:

Bankruptcies
Trading strategies
Customer complaints
Regulatory compliance
Hiring decisions

The SEC found that failure to preserve these messages was a violation of the federal securities laws, which require companies to keep records of all communications about their business. The SEC also found that this financial companies use of encrypted messaging apps created a “culture of secrecy” that discouraged employees from reporting potential wrongdoing.

In addition to Wells Fargo, the SEC also fined BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, and Morgan Stanley for failing to preserve messages from encrypted messaging apps. The SEC’s actions send a message to all financial firms that they must comply with the law and preserve all records of their business communications, regardless of the platform they are using. Here’s the full list of banks and their settlements with the SEC:

Company Name	Penalty Amount
Wells Fargo Securities, LLC	$125 million
BNP Paribas Securities Corp.	$35 million
SG Americas Securities, LLC	$35 million
BMO Capital Markets Corp.	$25 million
Mizuho Securities USA LLC	$25 million
Houlihan Lokey Capital, Inc.	$15 million
Moelis & Company LLC	$10 million
Wedbush Securities Inc.	$10 million
SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc.	$9 million
BNP Paribas S.A.	$75 million
Société Générale SA	$75 million
Wells Fargo Bank NA	$75 million
Bank of Montreal	$35 million

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WhatsApp & iMessage share the largest amount of user data to the FBI: Leaked Document

Sean — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 13:06:11 +0000

Smartphone users usually have a number of social media platform that they are active on daily. Out of these, there are specific apps that are geared for just messaging. While these apps may sometime contain sensitive information that the user wants to keep private, a leaked document has revealed that two major chatting apps, WhatsApp and iMessage, share quite a bit of data with the FBI.

According to a report from the Rolling Stone (Via AndroidAuthority), the news arrives from a leaked document from FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), which is a domestic intelligence and security based government service in the US. The document has revealed that Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage provide the agency with the most amount of information, which it can legally obtain from any messaging application.

As per the document, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Line all offered “limited” message content over a legal request from the FBI. While these platforms willingly offered ‘some’ data, others like Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, and Wickr did not disclose any message content. Although “limited” data doesn’t raise any alarms, the kind of information being shared might not be that harmless. The popular Android messaging app shares “only basic subscriber records” with a subpoena.

But in simpler terms, it means that the FBI is able to grab address book data from both the ‘target’ and their contacts if they have a search warrant. They can even track the source and destination of the messages sent from the app as well. Meaning, if you have saved the target’s contact info, your address book is also available for the FBI to snoop around in. This is even worse for the iMessage service. If iMessage users back up their messages on iCloud, the FBI has access to the actual message content as the Cupertino based giant is required to hand over iCloud encryption key with a search warrant.

Telegram gained more than 70 million new users during Facebook outage

Jeet — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 05:47:01 +0000

Telegram, an application for instant messaging, has said that the platform gained more than 70 million new users during the Facebook outage on Monday as people across the world were left without key messaging services for about six hours.

A couple of days ago, Facebook suffered an outage on its network for around six hours during which all of its services, including Messenger, social media platform Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp, were inaccessible for users globally.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that “the daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day.”

He also added that some of the users of the platform in the United States may have experienced slower speeds as millions rushed to sign up at the same time, but that the service worked as usual for the majority of users.

Telegram recently topped one billion downloads and earlier this year, the platform had over 500 million monthly active users.

It’s not just Telegram that benefited from Facebook’s problem. Signal, which is a competitor of WhatsApp and Telegram, also said that millions of new users joined the platform for secure messaging.

Also, this isn’t the first time Telegram and Signal gained millions of new users at the expense of Facebook. Recently, when WhatsApp updated its privacy policy and struggled to explain it properly, both platforms added millions of new users.

Signal, an encrypted messaging app, seems to be blocked in China

Jeet — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 10:16:41 +0000

Signal, one of the most popular encrypted messaging applications, has stopped working in China and is now only accessible using a virtual private network (VPN). It appears that the Chinese government has blocked access to the app.

This is not surprising given that China is known for blocking access to foreign apps and services. Products from tech giants like Google and Facebook are already blocked in China through the so-called Great Firewall.

While the Signal app is still available to download through Apple‘s App Store in China, messages sent by the users don’t go through, suggesting that the access has been blocked by the authorities. Not just the app, it appears that the website has also been banned.

Signal application getting blocked in China highlights the increasing internet censorship. The app got a huge surge in users recently when Facebook updated the privacy policy for WhatsApp and users started shifting towards Signal and Telegram.

It was one of the few Western social networks that remained accessible in China without the use of a virtual private network. But the app seems to have reached a substantial userbase in China and has caught the authorities’ attention.

Telegram and Signal see millions of new downloads after recent WhatsApp privacy changes

Sean — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 11:00:06 +0000

After the recent WhatsApp privacy changes went live, the userbase numbers of its alternatives Signal and Telegram have surged almost immediately. In just a short span, both messaging platforms have seen millions of new users download their respective applications.

Talking about Signal first, the messaging app has seen a large influx of new users, with the company seeing new downloads nearing a million every day. For those unaware, Facebook recently updates its privacy policy for WhatsApp and other platforms, which has led it to receive a lot of criticism over its users’ data security and privacy. Since then, many have switched over to alternatives like Signal, which saw over 810,000 downloads just last Sunday alone. This marked a near 18 fold growth in just a week, as per an ETNews report.

For those unaware, WhatsApp’s latest privacy policy has the company reserve the right to share user data, including location, phone number, with its parent company Facebook and its other social media platforms like Instagram and Messenger. Similar to Signal, Telegram has also seen a massive influx of new users, with the platform seeing 25 million new downloads in just the past 72 hours. Out of this figure, 38 percent of all new users are from Asia.

Other regions like Europe account for 27 percent, while Latin America and MENA regions account for 21 percent and 8 percent respectively. With the world becoming more privacy conscious, the move from WhatsApp has basically led to a mass exodus from the app to other platforms, which offer better privacy standards and user data protection. It remains to be seen how WhatsApp responds to its current predicament.

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