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".
Of course, they could have already learned that the hard way, and that could be why they turn a blind eye to Saudi wrongdoing.
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.
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.
Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog https://www.apnews.com/9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42
I had to edit my comment to add these two very important links from CNN and khashoggi twitter. khashoggi funded a Saudi group (they called themselves the Bees) who were working to counterattack Saudi bots and trend manipulation. His conversation and planning with them was all intercepted by the Saudi using NSO software.
The group with khashoggi were able to push their hashtag and had it trending just 12 days before his murder
Khashoggi tweet with the hashtag #what_do_you_know_about_the_bees. https://twitter.com/jkhashoggi/status/1043028035455221760?s=...
CNN: WhatsApp conversation with the bee group intercepted by Saudi using NSO
https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/12/02/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-...
QUOTING GAVIN DE BECKER “Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.”
Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking—and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t” ——- Looks like NSO doesn’t want us to know think it’s their software..
It’s just shocking to see some people not only reject that its NSO but go beyond and above their ways to defend NSO, like the commentator we are relying to.. So many comments here are again insisting it’s the brother who leaked it when this article was SPECIFICALLY written by Gavin de Becker to say it’s the Saudis and not the brother...
please when you make a statement or reject an accusation cite a reputable source.
Check out this psygroup proposal to blackmail people name/shame by Psy-group.
It says in the proposal that these methods of blackmailing often work to silence target.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-a-private-israe...
Worth mentioning that the smear campaign against Bezos on twitter is identical to what proposed to trumps son in his meeting at trump tower with George Nader Here is psy group proposal
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-ps...
Dictatorial and royal Arab governments are much friendlier to Israel than any democratic government would be. They’re not willing to officially regularise relations because they know how much their populace hates Israel but they’re perfectly willing to work with Israel. Israel knows this. That’s why they’re willing to work with these governments; they’re the closest to friends and allies they’re ever going to get as neighbours.
Not surprising. For example the US has a “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia and sells a lot more than software (jets, arms, etc)
Israel didn't help them either, it just didn't stop an Israeli company from selling certain products to the Saudis. Do you think the US is stopping all companies from doing business with the Saudis, or even just stopping them from selling tools that can be used by the regime against the public?
because they aren't, they are however supposedly doing that with Iran and to a certain extent, with Russia, so it's not like it's something they can't do, it's just that they choose not to.
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/08/25/every...)
I assume most software sold by these companies has backdoors either already shared with Aman/Mossad, or stored to be provided upon request.
I think they are basically like those vets that go and work security for private contractors, and some of them end up working for some really bad people.
About the backdoors, I can't tell, on the one hand, I would assume you're correct, that they do provide access to the Mossad+friends, but on the other hand, if it was discovered, they would lose credibility, and all those basically bad people wouldn't work with them, and any normal entity probably aren't working with them already, so they would lose their entire business.
Let’s see A) they are selling a product
B) they are helping propping the stable status quo
C) do you really help a country by selling oppression tools to its dictatorship, most democratic countries have overtaken dictatorships in all metrics with one exception
D) getting good will from the current rulers and establishing cooperative relationships within multiple levels of those countries
E) good will and relationships can be exploited
At a guess anyway
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.
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!)