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Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

theguardian.com

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Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#221

Post by tptacek »

vunie wrote: post #161
tptacek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto for Signal's cryptography; the Levchin Prize referees are a who's who of academic cryptography, including Dan Boneh, Kenny Paterson, and Nigel Smart; other Levchin winners have included Hugo Krawczyk, Mihir Bellare, and Joan Daemon. Any suggestion that Telegram's cryptography is somehow comparable owing to "half of them Ph.D's in math", or…

Has there been any weakness found in Telegram's encryption?

What encryption? Last I checked, there was no E2E group encryption (Telegram has a bizarre web page claiming that TLS to their servers addresses the privacy threat), and 1:1 E2E is disabled by default.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#222

Post by seppin »

fooey wrote: post #22
nopriorarrests wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. Given that RCE's are extremely rare, can't FB and AAPL announce 100M USD bounty to get them first and patch them, avoiding bad PR and brand impact? Damn, make it 200M?! Or bad actors can easily pay 5x more to exploit said 0 day on a few targets, so hackers will sell to them instead?

It's not worth anything like $100m to facebook. They pay barely enough to say they're willing to pay, but they don't really care.

Exactly. Facebook lost no customers and their stock took no hit as a result of this news. 99.999999% of their users will never know.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#223

Post by dingoegret »

bb88 wrote: post #27
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

So MBS or someone in Saudi intelligence is somehow behind the leak of the photos to the National Enquirer, and the subsequent divorce of the Bezos?

Where's the Feds on this? I don't find it comforting that attacks happening on the US's free press go unanswered by law enforcement. We should be indicting MBS.

Not a fan of MBS but talking about indicting a powerful foreign leader because a phishing hack is laughable.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#224

Post by dingoegret »

joe_the_user wrote: post #85
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Khashoggi must have really annoyed MBS. This has now cost the Saudis at least ten times as much goodwill as all anti-Saudi editorials in the Post and everywhere else together. That, or it was a favour to MBS American friends. The other people involved (David Pecker et al) and MBS do share a few friends in the White House, who also seem obsessed with the Washington Post and Bezos himself.

Saudi Arabia has a lot of exiles and so far as I know, it's not murdering everyone who criticizes them. Khashoggi is was not simply a journalist but a member of an influential family with Saudi Arabia [1]. MBS has dealt quite brutally with a variety of his internal opponents without Saudi Arabia. Murdering Khashoggi was something of a statement that MBS wouldn't let his direct opponents escape to other countries to o…

It's not a theocratic regime, it's a monarchy.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#225

Post by sleepyK »

puranjay wrote: post #190
ljm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that news? It’s well known that MBS is plugging money into tech in order to move away from fossil fuels. You’re not going to get any investment from Saudi Arabia that doesn’t go through him.

Everyone needs to know that every Softbank round is essentially a Saudi Arabia round.

I thought it was common knowledge... Masa is pretty much MBS's agent.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#226

Post by cududa »

puranjay wrote: post #190
ljm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that news? It’s well known that MBS is plugging money into tech in order to move away from fossil fuels. You’re not going to get any investment from Saudi Arabia that doesn’t go through him.

Everyone needs to know that every Softbank round is essentially a Saudi Arabia round.

It’s unlikely any money you take as a founder these days is free from Saudi limited partners

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#227

Post by cududa »

teh_infallible wrote: post #217
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

So MBS or someone in Saudi intelligence is somehow behind the leak of the photos to the National Enquirer, and the subsequent divorce of the Bezos?

Isn’t it entirely possible that MBS simply had a phone that was easier to hack than Bezos? That was the first thing I thought of. Also, how much of an amateur hacker would you have to be to launch an attack from your own personal device?

It was a phishing scheme. It probably didn’t happen from his device, but someone signed into his device after cultivating the bezoar relationship.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#228

Post by PlasticTank »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #206
PlasticTank wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of any directly related to it's encryption but multiple protest organizers were identified and arrested by the Hong Kong Police Force through Telegram, I'm not 100% sure but I believe they just added lists of suspected phone numbers onto their phones and looked in Telegram see which one's matched to Group admins.

That theory is quite possible. If the police join the group, they know the usernames of all of the people in the group, they can then start adding numbers to their contacts and if any of the usernames from the group show up they can then look up who owns the phone number in the government database.

It surprises me that they don't require both of you to have each others phone numbers in your contacts lists before giving away identifiable information.

Re: Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince'

#230

Post by AshwinDurairaj »

PlasticTank wrote: post #180
vunie wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been any weakness found in Telegram's encryption?

I don't know of any directly related to it's encryption but multiple protest organizers were identified and arrested by the Hong Kong Police Force through Telegram, I'm not 100% sure but I believe they just added lists of suspected phone numbers onto their phones and looked in Telegram see which one's matched to Group admins.

There were also claims of android keyboardd being used to log messages on Signal (and maybe Telegram), by Naomi Wu and others. No proof for this though.
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