They would only need to find a new exploit to install the malware, not rewrite the malware entirely. They have given demos as recently as 2018 where they have demonstrated a 0 interaction remote iphone 0day.

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 semi good news from this is for the politicians to know that: "If Bezos' phone can be hacked by Saudis, so can all the politicians' phones and their office workers' phones."

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 semi good news from this is for the politicians to know that: "If Bezos' phone can be hacked by Saudis, so can all the politicians' phones and their office workers' phones

Of course, they could have already learned that the hard way, and that could be why they turn a blind eye to Saudi wrongdoing.

Why would anyone assume that politicians phones weren’t hacked? If anything this behavior, of invading privacy and trying to control people by blackmailing them, happened to the richest man in the world.

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.

If they tried to blackmail Bezos, then imagine how many senators and representatives they may have blackmail on. This is a true crisis.

I always wondered how some regines, including the saudis, managed to get so much access to the US's political leadership.

> Just think of this, what if Trump was able to hack every congressman phone?

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

That’s not the same. The cia didn’t hack phones and blackmailed businessmen and politicians.

Are you trying to change the topic?

I quoted your line about executive branch spying on the members of the senate so I replied to that part. It wasn't just a theoretical possibility.

> 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.

what phone should we continue to use? A burner?

That and have sensitive discussions while both you and the other person are in the shower together. Also try to use language that requires the other party to have prior knowledge for your statements to make sense.

Perfect forward secrecy.

Purely speculation, but from a commercial perspective it would certainly make sense to have the highest-tier version of your product available only to select, high-paying customers; hypothetically this might include zero day exploits of up-to-date software. Pure speculation.

Would payments for this be higher than the potential costs of leaving known exploits active on their devices?

Exploits are only used to access the system. You can delete them from memory afterwards.

Generally these companies use whatever method or exploit is available. Depending on how good their employees and other sources are (incl. the blackmarket, intelligence agency contacts, etc.), it might occasionally take some time after a patch until they get a new 0-day exploit. FinFisher makes or made the same promises, according to their own advertisements.

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.