Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia accused of hacking Jeff Bezos' phone with malware-laden WhatsApp message Candid pictures used to threaten Amazon boss Jeff Bezos were exposed not by his current paramour's brother, as some believe, but through a sophisticated hacking operation personally directed by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, The Guardian suggests. The paper today claims to have been told by anonymous …
Hahaha haha. Good one.
As long as there is oil and money to be had, the ugly kingdom will have plenty of friends. Come on, if you can get away with murder, what's a little spying charge going to do.
Sadly, we live in a world where money and power can buy friends in the best places. The best friends, even the bestest friend in the most beautiful office of the greatest power of the world.
It's unlikely that the government of Saudi Arabia had any idea of what was going on, after all, who would they sell their oil to, and buy weapons from, if the US wasn't there?
On the other hand, it's well documented, but apparently not widely known, that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and interactions between the hijackers and the Saudi embassy in the US were redacted from the official US report into 9/11.
Geoff Bezos is not the USA, he's just the rich American owner of a newspaper that was highly critical of Saudi Arabia. Additionally, as mentioned in the article, he is most definitely not in favour with the Idiot-In-Chief either, who wouldn't care less about this hack - and probably actually enjoyed that it happened, even if the blackmail angle backfired.
It is not unreasonable to argue that the perpetrators never expected Bezos to do what he did, and that they hadn't therefore factored in public discussions of the hacking or a UN investigation with all the adverse publicity (and outcomes) it will attract.
after all, who would they sell their oil to, and buy weapons from, if the US wasn't there? .... phuzz
Everybody else would be problematical for Uncle Sam. As would be anybody else too. That suggests there be vast market choices readily immediately available with Uncle Sam just simply being in many a case, an incumbent one.
So the main lesson is one we knew already: Separate devices for your private and business lives. To which list we can now add 'intimate' lives.
I know everyone wants the convenience of always having a single device with all the information they may want to hand at any time - but we also know that just receiving a message can cause a compromise and there are always consequences.
So don't put everything on your phone... if your phone is your social/play device then don't let business matters anywhere near it.
Fair play to Mr Bezos though for effectively spiking the attempted blackmail - despite the consequences.
Enough to do what? But almost certainly, the answer is no. All you can accomplish by switching out a SIM is to change the number and provider you're using. Some phones can store a contact list on a SIM as well, but that's an abridged version of what it already has on the device itself. Furthermore, that only affects traditional phone services such as voice and SMS text messages. This involved a message application that runs without using information stored on a SIM.
I'd like to see the super rich like Bezos fund security research into anything they use day to day. We'd all benefit from it if he had a team looking into WhatsApp security finding bugs and alerting WhatsApp. Apparently this breach cost him his marriage and a $38 billion settlement with his wife, whatever it costs it's going to be a drop in the ocean compared to that.
Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos' phone are absurd. We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.Excellent. I support this.— Saudi Embassy (@SaudiEmbassyUSA) January 22, 2020
So when will Saudi Arabia allow US investigators unfettered access to all of MBS's communication devices, appointments, meeting notes, the Saudi Arabian security services records of such, and so on?
Crown Prince hacks Bezos' phone to perv at dick pics. Classic case of homoerotic penis envy. Deserves many lashes, and ideally a well-funded UN inquiry to establish just how small the prince's thing really is.
He even hired a guy called Mr Pecker to do the cover-up! Just how obsessed can one man be?
It's been known for some time there have been various vulnerabilities within this application. Attempting to pin it on someone can get a bit difficult, unless you can also get records from the various ISPs being used by the phone.
The way Bezos acts--has acted in the past, particularly in how he uses his news paper reporters to target those he doesn't like... I wouldn't put beyond scope, that Bezos hired someone in Saudi Arabia to hack his phone so he can then have his paper (or leak it out to other reporters), that his phone was hacked. Bezos has a bit of a credibility, likeability and is a known cheater. He's looking for ways to make himself the victim, instead of the predator.
Let's get real, it's not like the images leaked were anything too compromising or made Bezos look bad. If you were out to hurt Bezos, you would have used the worst photos on the phone--and/or doctored some. Neither was the case.
Too often today, people believe everything the press (or anyone) when they say something a bit outrageous. Without taking the time to dig a bit deeper, and use some common sense.
This story gets murkier with every step. So, Bezos keeps annoying Trump by inconsiderately printing the truth and calling the big orange retard out on his lies. Consequently Trump's mate who runs a shitty little scandal mag starts targetting Bezos, who hits back by getting his security guy to start investigating. Bezos then gets a blackmail attempt from said shitty publisher threating to expose his dick pics unless Bezos specifically states that there was no forgeign involvement in hacking his devices.
Bezos calls their bluff, publishes his own dick pics and tells them to go fuck themselves. His security guy probably takes note of the specific terms of the blackmail agreement and starts focusing his efforts on uncovering evidence of foreign hacking of Bezos' devices. Subsequently he uncovers links from the head of a foreign government who, for a time, was quite friendly with Bezos but is even more friendly with Trump.
Skeptics will immediately wonder why the fuck the Saudi's would be interested in getting involved in this. The obvious answer being that not only was Bezos printing things about Trump but one of the columnists working for the same paper was continually slating the Saudi regime.
Interestingly, Khashoggi wasn't clipped until after the Bezos hack. I wonder if the Saudi intelligence service extracted more than just dick pics and got some juicy info about what Khashoggi was going to do next and this prompted the badly-planned embassy hit?
>Interestingly, Khashoggi wasn't clipped until after the Bezos hack.
Maybe Khashoggi found more than the prince anticipated. You don't print everything; you print only things that can be proven by two or more sources and you are limited by the number of words. So there may be more dirt worth digging for.
Why assume that the prince was responsible just because he sent the virus? If you received an infected kitten video from your mother, you would not immediately conclude that your parents were trying to hack your phone, would you?
Quite plausible IMO is that someone decided to hack the Saudi prince. Not realising that the video was a trojan horse, the prince forwarded it to his social media contacts, giving the original hacker a bonus. Not sure I understand the alleged connection between this and the Khashoggi murder either.
When a Western government and/or a whole bunch of Western media articles make the same allegation, most Western people tend to regard it as being a fact. I do not assume that the Saudi prince was responsible for the murder in Turkey, or that the Russians were responsible for the nerve agent attack in England, or even that Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant just because "everyone says so". Look very critically at the evidence being given to support those allegations (or the absence thereof).
Everyone can draw his own conclusions about Saudi Arabia / MBS on this one:
- Murdering a Washington Post journalist.
- Well documented incidences of spying on mobile phones, using highly developed commercial spyware.
- Well documented history of pressuring people they don't like.
So you don't need to suspend your disbelief to believe this particular allegation. Rather seems to fit an established pattern. It's quite the asymmetric fight: MBS fights for his reputation, his opponents fight for their limbs and lives. Or their marriage, you get the idea.
Straight out of a playbook for a medieval prince: preserve your power through fear.
Saudi is not the only country that has done such things by a long chalk, and when state actors are involved "false flag" scenarios are always a possibility, as are false accusations, especially when also involving very rich individuals. You could cite many countries using evidence of "an established pattern" Including the US, which has used viruses developed by the NSA against its own citizens in the past.
I do not say that the prince definitely did not do it and I am not suggesting who else did - I am just urging caution about believing that this particular person was responsible for this particular event. There are plenty of ways that other states could have done it and implicated the prince.
Incidentally, the virus in question originated in Israel, not that anything should be implied from that.
The BBC have been broadcasting a slightly different version of this story, citing a UN report (from some months ago IIRC) as a source for it.
Sorry to be vague: I was travelling all day yesterday (bloomin' rail disruption), and getting an often-poor radio signal on my phone, so I only half-heard it.
This post has been deleted by its author
Saudis owe us a lot; we went to war for them twice; we could have let Saddam overrun them. So, for us to let this idiot of a prince get away with his activities can only come about if
a. trump was already aware of it. No state actor will do it otherwise. It must have been cleared with him using vague words
b. this was personal for trump; trump did not support Khashoggi nor Bezos
c. trump is beholden to the Saudis as well as to Putin to a degree that makes any discord a matter of existential threat
d. trump may have even instigated the whole thing
e. the US agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI) must have more information than they are disclosing
f. Saudis are dictating our foreign policy
g. There must be intelligence briefings that our senators and house intelligence members are not talking about.
h. we don't know of an alternative to the Saudi royal family
i. Our vulnerability to oil has clouded our vision
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
