Messaging Is Now an Attack Surface, Not Just a Compliance Problem

A message appeared to come from Signal Support warning of suspicious activity and asked the recipient to share a code to secure the account. 

That was enough. 

German security agencies warned in February about a phishing campaign impersonating Signal’s support function and targeting politicians, military personnel, diplomats and journalists. The aim was to persuade recipients to hand over the credentials or verification codes needed to take over their accounts. UK guidance for people at heightened risk of targeted attacks describes what can follow: attackers may add their own device to an account, enter group chats without the owner noticing and impersonate people the victim knows.

Politico reported that the EU’s cyber defence unit had warned member-state governments about targeted attacks on officials through WhatsApp and Signal. Its presentation identified the takeover of senior officials’ messaging accounts as a leading threat, following warnings from several national cyber and intelligence agencies. The case gives the risk a clear shape: an attacker does not need to break into an enterprise system when they can gain access to a trusted conversation through the account of the person they want to reach. 

The phishing message may be simple, but the access it creates is not. 

A compromised account gives an attacker a view into live conversations and a credible route to the people inside them. A familiar name in a group chat carries a degree of trust that an unknown email address often does not. It can be used to draw out sensitive information, send malicious files or pass the same lure to the next person. 

Social-engineering techniques are expanding beyond email into voice, messaging and browser-based channels, according to CERT-EU’s 2025 threat landscape report. The same report notes the growing use of AI for personalised phishing content and deepfakes of officials. That gives attackers more scope to make a message feel plausible, while the underlying account-takeover tactic remains familiar. 

For enterprises, this has become more than an off-channel communications or records-retention issue. Messaging is now part of the attack surface. 

Business messaging has outgrown the controls around it 

Email phishing remains a serious problem, but organisations have spent decades building ways to manage it. They can screen inbound messages, block known threats, search for a campaign across mailboxes and investigate who received it. But those capabilities are often missing when business conversations take place on personal consumer messaging accounts. 

While encryption is essential for protecting messages in transit, it does not establish a verified business identity, give a security team a record of a suspicious interaction or help an organisation assess the reach of an attack after the fact. When an employee receives a convincing message on a personal WhatsApp or Signal account, it can be difficult for the organisation to know it happened at all. 

The same challenge appears in regulated industries every day. A relationship manager may be speaking to a client. A trader may be coordinating with a broker. A lawyer may be responding to an external adviser. The conversation is commercially important, but it lives outside the systems that would usually support identity checks, security review and incident response. 

It is easy to describe this as off-channel communication, but that captures only part of the problem.  

The missing record creates a compliance exposure; the lack of visibility creates a security exposure. 

Consumer messaging is difficult to remove from real-world workflows 

Many organisations have tried to deal with the problem through policy. Staff are told not to use WhatsApp or Signal for business communication, and the policy looks clear on paper. But people outside the organisation are not always willing to follow it. 

Clients, brokers, advisers, suppliers and partners generally use the channels that work and are convenient for them. A commercial organization cannot require every external contact to move onto its preferred messaging app before a conversation can begin. When a channel is blocked internally, business communication often continues on a personal phone instead. That leaves the organisation further from the conversation, at the very moment it needs to know who is communicating and whether the exchange is safe. 

A more durable approach recognises the channel’s place in the workflow and brings its business use into a governed environment. 

Governance gives security teams something to work with 

A governed deployment will not stop every phishing attempt. It gives an organisation more information and control to reduce risk and investigate an event. 

Business conversations can take place through verified professional identities, giving employees and counterparties a clear way to recognise the account they are dealing with. On consumer messaging, a familiar display name can be enough to make an impostor seem legitimate. A verified business identity gives the recipient a stronger basis for recognising who has contacted them. 

Attachments can be scanned and sanitised before they reach a recipient. Suspicious changes in a known contact’s behaviour can be flagged for review. A tamper-evident record can show what was sent, who received it and whether a similar message reached other people in the organisation. 

Security and compliance teams have something more useful than a screenshot from a personal device when they need to establish the facts. 

A compromised account can quickly become a wider incident 

The first challenge after an account is compromised is usually scope. 

Which clients or colleagues received messages from the account? Which group chats did the attacker enter? Did they request documents, payment details or further verification codes? Were other employees approached using the compromised identity? 

Without a reliable business record, those questions can take days to answer, if they can be answered at all. Security teams may be left gathering screenshots, asking employees to search personal devices and reconstructing a sequence of events from partial information. 

A governed environment gives them a starting point: a record of the relevant business conversations, the identities involved and the ability to search for related activity. Incident response still requires judgement and action. It becomes far harder when the communications at the centre of the incident sit entirely outside the organisation’s view. 

A private account and a personal conversation that never touch the business environment will remain outside its reach. The practical objective is to bring the conversations that carry client, commercial or regulatory significance out of that blind spot. 

The questions security and compliance leaders should ask 

A useful starting point is to review where messaging is used and what sits beyond the organisation’s view: 

• Which messaging channels carry important business decisions or client communication? 
• Which employees rely on personal accounts to manage those conversations?
• Can the organisation verify the identity of the parties involved and investigate a suspicious message? 
• If an account is compromised, can security teams identify the people and conversations affected? 

The answers shape the organisation’s ability to respond when a convincing message lands in the wrong place. 

Messaging is part of how business gets done. It needs the same attention to identity, visibility and investigation that organisations already apply to the rest of their communications environment. 

LeapXpert enables, captures and governs client communication across WhatsApp, Signal, WeChat, Telegram, SMS, RCS and LINE, with messaging security, governance controls and tamper-evident recordkeeping built in. Book a demo.