Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos' Phone 'Hacked By Saudi Crown Prince' (theguardian.com) 73
According to the Guardian, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had his phone "hacked" in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. From the report: The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world's richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis. This analysis found it "highly probable" that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.
The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on May 1 of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos's phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used. [...] The disclosure is likely to raise difficult questions for the kingdom about the circumstances around how U.S. tabloid the National Enquirer came to publish intimate details about Bezos's private life -- including text messages -- nine months later. It may also lead to renewed scrutiny about what the crown prince and his inner circle were doing in the months prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in October 2018 -- five months after the alleged "hack" of the newspaper's owner.
The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on May 1 of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos's phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used. [...] The disclosure is likely to raise difficult questions for the kingdom about the circumstances around how U.S. tabloid the National Enquirer came to publish intimate details about Bezos's private life -- including text messages -- nine months later. It may also lead to renewed scrutiny about what the crown prince and his inner circle were doing in the months prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in October 2018 -- five months after the alleged "hack" of the newspaper's owner.
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Phone type? (Score:2)
You'd think the article would indicate what brand of phone and OS he was using.
Re: Phone type? (Score:2)
Tech CEOs that don't use iPhone are very rare. They usually are competitors with Apple. I don't see how Bezos could see Apple as a competitor, so I'd be very surprised to find out Bezos doesn't use an iPhone.
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Uh, Hello? Amazon Kindle Fire Phone.
Re: Phone type? (Score:2)
Was cancelled in 2015.
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Was it a FirePhone, maybe? Could it even explain why they scrapped that project?
Re:Phone type? (Score:4, Informative)
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Just make a video showing a text "your phone cannot view this video. Please download driver from http://xyz.abc/def.exe [xyz.abc] to view it", and some people might fall for it...
That, or a buffer overflow in whatsapp
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Buffer overflow or similar? I think if a buffer overflow or similar exploit is found then infection should be trivial.
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Wasn't Java/managed-runtime supposed to end buffer overflows?
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - No.
(ok, it was *supposed* to, but these days with all the timing side channel attacks and rowhammer, and probably things we don't even know about yet, nothing is secure -- nothing.)
Trump no doubt (Score:1, Interesting)
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If the Clown Prince had a time machine, he wouldn't need to do favors for the likes Trump.
Using a phone while wealthy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Using a phone while wealthy? (Score:4, Informative)
Eh. His wealth was created by building a company that used the Internet as the world's most available catalog, it would make sense that he would want or need to have several forms of communication instantly available to him even when his personal staff aren't immediately with him.
His mistake was using a communications device that went through a regular provider. He probably should have had a phone-like device, configured to tunnel through whatever provider he was using back to an Amazon IT center, where literally everything could be sanity-checked, at least from a probability standpoint, for legitimacy, and cut-off if not legitimate.
Basically the "phone" would be a virtual machine or chroot jail running on the hardware whose job is to act as that network tunnel, and all communications from the "phone" are checked, plus all incoming communications are checked as well. This even works to an extent for encrypted traffic, since things like communications protocols headers and other traffic usually conform to preset patterns, the traffic exchange when you use a protocol is identifiable even if the contents aren't viewable. Additionally, the time of day that certain kinds of traffic occur can be compared to baslines to determine the likelihood of legitimacy. If a phone is trying to connect-out at 3:30am to send out a large amount of information then it's very likely that it's not legitimate and the servers in between can cut the cord and alert the IT staff or even the user.
Additionally the hardware layer could have its own software that analyzes what's running in the chroot jail or VM to analyze what it's doing, like going through files that it has no reason to go through.
Re:Using a phone while wealthy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And if he's smart about how he sets it up, that entity that monitors his communications is a function of his personal lawyer.
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He's rich enough to buy his own ISP and a company that makes phones to go with it, why he diddles around with the same crap you and I (non-billionaires) do is beyond me.
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Re: Using a phone while wealthy? (Score:1)
you and I (non-billionaires) do
Fine... include me out, whydoncha. You know, you could have just said, "us slashdotters do"
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why he diddles around with the same crap you and I (non-billionaires) do is beyond me.
Same reason why people like you and I install WhatsApp: to communicate with other people who insist on using WhatsApp and nothing else.
Even virtual machines and firewalls would not have helped here: either WhatsApp would have tunneled right through them, or on the contrary these would have blocked WhatsApp, causing the user to forego them "just this time".
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Same reason why people like you and I install WhatsApp: to communicate with other people who insist on using WhatsApp and nothing else.
He could have bought WhatsApp lock, stock, and barrel and had them build a secure version. And that includes the buildings they're in and all of the employees' homes and cars. It wouldn't even amount to a rounding error for him on his bank balance.
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Such a pity an Amazon Phone didn't exist, ever. You know, a phone designed and sold by Amazon that uses Amazon's services. Sort of like a Kindle, but mo
Re:Using a phone while wealthy? (Score:4, Interesting)
(and sending dick pics)
That actually happened didn't it? LOL.
How mortifying.
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It is funny, but they wear all these silk jackets and things, excessively comfortable clothes, if they carry two devices to keep their phone separate from their apps, it would weigh down their pockets. They need a single device they can carry, and set down on the table in front of them, their clothes are not functional enough for things like "secure devices."
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Given that Amazon actually makes an Android tablet and once made a phone, it wouldn't surprise me if there was a custom phone build available for senior Amazon execs with a bunch of extra security baked in along with cloud sync, always-on VPN, remote monitoring, etc.
What's kind of surprising is that there *isn't* some kind of high security phone platform like this commonly on the market and used by the Fortune 500 for their senior/high security personnel. It's kind of crazy how much of their data is probabl
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What's kind of surprising is that there *isn't* some kind of high security phone platform like this commonly on the market and used by the Fortune 500 for their senior/high security personnel. It's kind of crazy how much of their data is probably easily accessible by Apple or Google because they use an ordinary consumer platform, even if it has MDM and various OS supported privacy lockdowns.
I believe these phones exist, but we don't know of them because they do not have to market to the masses.
https://www.intactphone.com/ [intactphone.com]
https://www.silentcircle.com/ [silentcircle.com]
However, I'm not sure even those are immune to exploits against the baseband chipset:
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
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If that were the case, I doubt the planet would have been able to have access to pictures of Jeff Bezo's penis.
Bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
The crown prince is going to get his Amazon Prime cancelled. You don't mess with Bezos!
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Secure phones don't exist. They are all built off of closed source (even Android).
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It was an external app he manually clicked on. A video hijacked WhatsApp, which had the rights to see files, and send them off the phone. Permissions should limit apps to a DL folder, but that's not how any OS works. Some phones claim to be more secure than others, but the only way to enforce that is to run every app in a separate sandbox. And nobody does that. Maybe Amazon could put something together...
Re:Holy shit! (Score:4, Informative)
iOS does that. Actually, it didn't let apps have access to the filesystem at all, which people complained about forever, so now it gives access to a very limited sandboxed filesystem. Which people complain about.
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Users prefer insecure phones.
That explains push notifications.
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All that money, and he can't buy a secure phone?
Trump and Kushner also use WhatsApp (to avoid the possibility of FOIA requests). I wonder how many three-letter agencies have installed spyware on them...
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"I wonder how many three-letter agencies have installed spyware on them..." All of them. After all, if you were working for the U.S. Government, would you trust Trump and his grifter family?
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Trump is well known as a brilliant computer hacker.
Money fight! (Score:3)
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Alternatively, the Saudi prince's phone had already been hacked, and was a stepping stone to get to other targets. The question is whether it was by a nation state, or the usual Russian mob after things of value to sell on the dark market. The National Enquirer story would suggest the latter, though the timing was a bit slow.
Still a money fight (Score:2)
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Saudi Arabia has ties to Enquirer (Score:2)
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The Nat. Enquirer has a long history with Trump helping him bury (catch and refuse to release) stories from people who Trump has dicked over. They buy the rights and then bury the story. So it is more likely the Saudi's trying to get on Trump's good side because they know he has no loyalty to any allies. The U.S. should have severed its ties to that inbred pile of Saudi beef jerky long ago.
And then what happened? (Score:2)
So this Saudi person had access to Jeff's phone... then what value was extracted from this?
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So this Saudi person...
Priceless. That's like calling Warren Buffet "some guy from Nebraska." Or Carlos Slim "some guy from Mexico."
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"So this Saudi person...
Priceless. That's like calling Warren Buffet "some guy from Nebraska." Or Carlos Slim "some guy from Mexico."
It's MBS short name or Man with Bone Saw long name.
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The Saudis call him Abu Rasasa [businessinsider.com]
One reported example involved MbS and a Saudi land-registry official. The crown prince reportedly demanded that the official "help him appropriate a property," and when the official refused, he received an envelope that contained a single bullet.
MbS was apparently given the name "Abu Rasasa" by the people of Saudi Arabia. The nickname translates to "father of the bullet" in English
Some journalist/analyst calls him Gadaffi on Steroids [aljazeera.com]
This is Gaddafi on steroids. This is worse than Gaddafi because he [MBS] has billions of dollars to spend on the US, on PR, on lobbying, on buying consensus. This is where the danger lies.
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"So this Saudi person had access to Jeff's phone... then what value was extracted from this?"
The Saudi prince can now watch Amazon Prime for free.
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Two phones (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're the world's richest man, you should be able to afford *two* phones. A dumb phone you hand out the number to random outsiders like a Saudi prince, and is only used for voice.
And a smartphone that only connects to your AWS servers, who scan all incoming and outgoing data to prevent malware and stolen data.
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You can't exactly scan data sent by proprietary protocols like whatsapp.
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That would help ensure you didn't forget to change your burner regularly.
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Maybe he could get one of those Amazon buttons to buy more burner phones whenever he's running low.
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random outsiders like a Saudi prince, and is only used for voice
How do you know he's a random outsider? Maybe they are BFFs? Do you assume they are not hanging out together just because one of them is running a evil empire, exploiting thousands of people, laughing at human rights and climate change issues while the other is a prince?
Was it really the Crown Prince? (Score:4, Interesting)
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nah, he had a journalist murdered who wrote critical articles about him, for a newspaper Bezos owns. Benefit of the doubt is long gone.
Conspiracy conjecture fiction (Score:2)
'highly probable' analysis (Score:2)
Please quit the dumm down descriptions and publish an informative and useful news article. What type of video container, on what [mobile] OS would allow permissions to other than display the included data.
I mean if you want to tell me someone embedded scripting with an extension that Outlook executed other than what the user gave permission to launch, I'll buy that. But if you expect me to believe that there's a method of sending a user a jpg, mpg, mp4, mkv or similar that does other than launch the truste
"Hacked" has a different meaning in Saudi Arabia (Score:2)