Jeff Bezos phone hacking incident

en.wikipedia.org

26 points·niklasbuschmann··5 comments

> The video in the file was not infected, but the downloader of the file could not be analyzed by investigators because it was encrypted by WhatsApp.[16]

Can anyone translate that back to tech for us? What exactly is being called a "downloader" here?

What a labyrinthian Wikipedia article. Surely they could have written it more clearly, and in plain English.

> claimed that in May 2018 with "medium to high confidence" the phone of Jeff Bezos had been hacked by a file sent from the WhatsApp account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.

Is someone has claimed this to be I would said - that's silly MbS knows better than to conduct business over WhatsApp, and JB knows better than to open files sent to him.

I mean, can you imagine a movie where this is the plot?

> JB knows better than to open files sent to him.

That's not how these NSO spyware attacks work, or used to work – the ones that are now known were zero-click exploits in WhatsApp / iMessage that required no interaction with the message.

https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...

Of course I'm only guessing that's what was potentially used in this case, but doesn't seem too far fetched.

Frontline had a pretty decent series on Pegasus malware.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/global-spywar...

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