A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.

The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.

Data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, and other financial institutions are included in the hacked material, according to screenshots of messages and backend systems obtained by 404 Media.

Mr. Deepfakes, the go-to site for nonconsensual deepfake porn, says it’s shutting down and not coming back because it lost a service provider and data. 

“A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” a notice that appears when visitors go to the site now says. The site's forums and videos are no longer available at the time of writing. “We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week.”

We don’t know why Mr. Deepfakes was shut down, which service it was cut from, and why. The person behind the site is also still anonymous, though in January the German newspaper Der Spiegel said it was able to identify them as a 36-year-old in Toronto who has been working at a hospital for several years. 

“While this is an important victory for victims of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), it is far too little and far too long in the making,” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images, told us in an email. “The technology, financial, and advertising services that continue to profit from and enable sites like mrdeepfakes have to take more responsibility for their part in the creation and distribution of NCII. While this takedown is a good start, there are many more just like this one, so let’s not stop here.”

Shortly after we first reported about the emergence of deepfake videos in 2017, named after the pseudonymous Reddit user of the same name who first started sharing videos that face swapped female celebrities into existing porn videos, the practice quickly spread to other corners of the internet. But no site was as central to the development, distribution, and monetization of deepfake porn videos like Mr. Deepfakes, which quickly gained popularity after Reddit, Pornhub, and other sites banned deepfake porn and other forms of nonconsensual media following our reporting. 

Mr. Deepfakes allowed users to upload videos to its site like other porn tube sites, and also connected users with creators, who sold their services and created videos per request. These creators were often paid via cryptocurrency. While other porn tube sites, social media, and various internet platforms gradually banned nonconsensual synthetic sexual media over the years and have successfully moderated against it to various degrees of success, Mr. Deepfake kept hosting these videos the entire time. 

More importantly, the Mr. Deepfakes forums became an important resource for people who created nonconsensual media. Users on the site flocked to the forums to develop new techniques with each other, link to apps and tools that helped them create deepfakes, and shared datasets designed to recreate the likeness of specific real people. 

In 2022 we reported that DeepFaceLab, one of the most advanced and popular open-source projects for creating deepfake videos, was developed in large part by users on the Mr. Deepfakes forums. A research paper presenting the DeepFaceLab method originally credited Mr. Deepfakes (“Mr. Dpfks”) for providing the forums where much of its development happened. Mr. Deepfakes name was taken off the paper after our story. 

While Mr. Deepfakes is gone, at least for now, unfortunately its toxic legacy will likely live on forever. The community that it built has since connected on Telegram, where much of that same kind of development of techniques and sharing of nonconsensual media happens now. The tools and apps that it popularized have also spread far and wide across the internet, with even companies like Apple and Google struggling to keep it off its platforms, and social media like Instagram struggling to stop them from advertising there.