Does anyone have a sense (even broadly) of the specific methods that were used to intercept Bezos' texts? Did he use an iOS or Android device? Were the cell towers attacked? Was he the victim of a good 'ol zero day piece of malware? (I presume Bezos isn't the kind of guy to click on random email attachments on his phone).
Just curious what universe they were playing in.
(Speculation welcome!)
I’m wondering if there are new exploits, or if Bezos or his girlfriend ran really old ios versions. The latter seems unlikely.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvakb3/inside-nso...
>The entrepreneur, who spoke to Motherboard on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the meeting, agreed, but said that NSO would have to target his other iPhone, which he brought with him and had a foreign phone number. He gave NSO that phone number and put the phone on the desk.
>After “five or seven minutes,” the contents of his phone’s screen appeared on a large display that was set up in the meeting room, all without him even clicking on a malicious link, he said.
>“I see clicking on all kinds of icons: email icon, SMS icon, and other icons,” he told Motherboard. “And suddenly I saw all my messages in there and I saw all the email in there and they were capable to open any information that was on my [iPhone].”
A good story to tell next time when politician want to enact some new law to weaken the security of phone, for Apple/Android to build security holes for the "law enforcement / governments".
A lot of things mentioned in this article is similar to what happened with Alabama governer Robert Bentley. Early 2016, a leaked recordering of his conversation with his mistress was leaked to media (unknown source) Then a year later his wife screenshot his iMessage conversations with his mistress Rebekah! And everyone thinks it’s the wife. Between 2016-2017 and before the wife screenshot these photos there was an organized campaign against Alabama governer. Who by the way: - Supoorted Kasich to run for president - took down a confederate flag - was planning a settlement for Syrian refugee..
Just think of this, what if Trump was able to hack every congressman phone?
What gave national acquirer the confidence to black Bezos? Unless of course they’ve done it too many times to too many people. The question who are these victims?
We need to know who is/was used as a tool to implement Trump and kushner agenda.
Something like that already happened: https://www.democracynow.org/2014/8/1/john_brennan_faces_cal...
So what will we do if it happens and we find out. I guess he'll just apologize and we'll pretend it never happened? It worked like that last time:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/cia-spied-senate-committee
> According to CIA spokesperson Dean Boyd, agency director John Brennan apologized
Are you trying to change the topic?
> The cia didn’t hack phones and blackmailed businessmen and politicians.
We know they hacked the devices of senators and even apologized for it later. Did the blackmail them? Could be. How do you know they didn't? Bezos was probably the rare case where he exposed their blackmail, in most cases, because of what it is, blackmail is something that is kept secret.
Of course, they could have already learned that the hard way, and that could be why they turn a blind eye to Saudi wrongdoing.
Most of the time you don't even need a 0-day exploit, simple trojan horses/targeted phishing attacks work fine. Fake celltowers can also be used. The possibilities are nearly endless. Endpoint security is virtually nonexistent.
CLEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...
SS7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protoc...
The NSA internally described PRISM as "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. Quoting Snowden in regards to this, "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."
Note this includes live communications! So this opens a pretty big question. How? One extremely conspicuous point is that when companies initially tried to deny being involved in PRISM, they all claimed something more or less the same. 'We do not allow any government agency to have DIRECT access to our servers.':
- Apple - "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers"
- Facebook - "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers"
- Google - "We have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government —or any other government— direct access to our servers"
And so on. This is conspicuous enough to have it effectively said that access to the NSA is facilitated through some "indirect" means. The exact technical implementation of this totally-not-a-backdoor is not as relevant as the fact that this totally-not-a-backdoor can be exploited by other actors if the means are discovered. And of course there's plain old social engineering and spy games in play. Or even plain old greed. NSA worker #235,123 gets evidence that the world's wealthiest man, arguably the single most relevant economic player in the world, is cheating on his wife with some rather extreme and embarrassing evidence of such? That's going to be worth a whole lot to many people who would like to use that information against him, and an NSA worker would be just the sort of person to know who'd be interested in it.
The US got very very lucky that Snowden seems to have been patriotic and ethical, but nonetheless his actions emphasize that all the scrutiny and profiling in the world can't really predict what people will do. And as we continue to expand our surveillance state, it means the damage a single disgruntled worker can do continues to grow in proportion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/national-enqui...
I agree that something that I didn’t say would have been disingenuous, but I’m not sure why you would bring it up.
I’m sure you would agree that it being an op-ed tells us primarily that this article was not written by a neutral third party. We would not be surprised if it makes little to no effort to present opposing views. As an op-ed it is free to make unsupported conjectures and should probably be approached with a higher bar of skepticism and should be expected to provide facts or evidence to back up any of its novel claims.
In short, op-eds are not news, and should not be treated as such. Not that “news” is particularly deserving of the distinction these days.
I said simply that we should not take op-ed claims at face value. You said you don’t agree at all. I mean, you are perfectly free to take the claims at face value if you like, but appeal to authority is hardly compelling and perhaps even a bit disingenuous itself.
I'm so tired with these pseuso-SOC style reports detailing <some group> from the US, north Korea (lol?), Saudis, <whatever> just because someone changed a path of a binary to /home/valdimir and made a post on a Russian underground forum.
Ockham's razor here, she reused passwords, got pwned, he sent her dick pics, as 80% of the people of this world do these days, and they got recovered.
But yes, most governments that do any intelligence work at all do develop and/or buy Android and IOS 0day and rootkit tools from shady private companies.