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Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

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Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#241

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, got his phone hacked and embarrassing text messages stolen off it from a vulnerability in the video parsing library in WhatsApp in a message sent to him by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. So Amazon as a company is now very sensitive to what applications are installed on staff devices and how data on those devices can be extracted from vulnerabilities in other installed apps. Th…

Does anyone have any technical detail of that story. It is hard to imagine how a bug in the image parse library can be utilise to steal text message.

oh bugs in the parsing libraries are the things MOSTLY used for attacks like this.

Parsing is hard, and parsers are buggy and lead to all kind of unsafe C code

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#242

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, got his phone hacked and embarrassing text messages stolen off it from a vulnerability in the video parsing library in WhatsApp in a message sent to him by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. So Amazon as a company is now very sensitive to what applications are installed on staff devices and how data on those devices can be extracted from vulnerabilities in other installed apps. Th…

Does anyone have any technical detail of that story. It is hard to imagine how a bug in the image parse library can be utilise to steal text message.

Sure, the blog post below covers it, and the vulnerability was probably CVE-2019-11931. You can do an awful lot with a buffer overflow if you're clever.

https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/04/what-the-jeff-bezos-whatsa...

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#243
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If any company expects me to access my work email while mobile, they have to provide a phone. I never mix work and personal. I've also never had a company say no to that.

Adding another anecdote, when I said I did not want to let work control my mobile phone, my boss told me I could figure out whether I wanted to keep the job or not

Well, for me, that is a hill I choose to die on.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#244
post #109

Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own right), but I wonder if there's opportunity here for a potential competitor.

Surprised nobody talked about Fb's Lasso which intends to "copy" TikTok and recently got killed.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#245
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're devices that are under Amazon's MDM. So if the device was enrolled with their MDM then it applies.

I'm surprised devices enrolled in their MDM would have EVER allowed Tik Tok in the first place.

A lot of companies with MDM have it just because they need to check a box saying they have it, and so that they can remote wipe and make sure users put a PIN on their device at least. Extra capabilities like authorized software lists, URL filtering, etc add admin overhead and are just not worth it for the company to get into.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#246
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third option - accessing only browser sites - is under appreciated. I never needed to install Google's MDM on my mobile devices, I just used mobile web gmail and so forth. It's great, honestly, and the mobile web Calendar has the advantage that it doesn't destroy your battery life like the Calendar app will. I even saw a guy using the code review site on his mobile, on BART. That was dumb from the standpoint of i…

Having the code review app available outside of the corp network / VPN is pretty unusual, at least for shops who aren't just using SaaS services that are available publicly anyway (github, gitlab.com, etc).

You must have missed their "zero trust" initiative.

"""BeyondCorp began as an internal Google initiative to enable every employee to work from untrusted networks without the use of a VPN."""

https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because their GDP is growing and at the current pace they will pass the USA around 2025. That's why the USA cares now. Left unchecked, China will soon be the biggest economy in the world. The USA doesn't want that.

> The USA doesn't want that. Nothing wrong with having another superpower surpass you but China is not the superpower anyone wants leading the world given their track record.

> China is not the superpower anyone wants leading the world given their track record.

Anyone? Really? I think a good number of people on this planet is fed up with the US leading the world with its own track record. Not saying I agree with them but saying no one would be happy to see China surpass the US is wrong in my opinion.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#248

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, got his phone hacked and embarrassing text messages stolen off it from a vulnerability in the video parsing library in WhatsApp in a message sent to him by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. So Amazon as a company is now very sensitive to what applications are installed on staff devices and how data on those devices can be extracted from vulnerabilities in other installed apps. Th…

Does anyone have any technical detail of that story. It is hard to imagine how a bug in the image parse library can be utilise to steal text message.

It starts with a buffer overflow. This then will allow you to execute your own code.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vine was different. I just posted this on another thread couple of days ago. > Vine was 6 second long video clips. Comparing Vine to TikTok is somewhat like comparing TikTok to YouTube videos. They are different. Lot of TikTok popularity has come from offering songs/lip syncing functionality (done better by their acquisition of musica.ly). That wouldn't have worked on 6 second Vines.

That's like saying Twitter is not Twitter because we can type more than 140 characters now.

For the rest of us that don't follow social media systems closely (just looked up, I'm trusting my search results):

TikTok allows 15 second videos (only 2.5x the length of Vine videos) but also has a way to string multiple videos together for 60 seconds of play time (10x longer than Vine had).

So this is actually a pretty fair comparison (old Twitter @ 140 vs new Twitter @ 280) if you ignore stringing them together.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If any company expects me to access my work email while mobile, they have to provide a phone. I never mix work and personal. I've also never had a company say no to that.

> If any company expects me to access my work email while mobile, they have to provide a phone. No they don't. If you don't like it, switch employers.

I don't think you understood. I _would_ switch jobs. That's what I meant by they have to.
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