Bezos and bin Salman met at a dinner in Los Angeles in 2018, and exchanged numbers. Soon after that, they had a falling out as Saudi Arabia murdered veteran journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who also used to write for Bezos-owned Washington Post. There’s no confirmation as of now, but it’s highly likely that Saudi’s used the notorious Pegasus software or Hacking Team’s Galileo, created by the Israel-based NSO group, to get the data from Bezos’ phone.
— İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي (@iyad_elbaghdadi) January 21, 2020 Last year, WhatsApp sued NSO Group for snooping on over 1,400 individuals, including journalists and activists across the world, using its Pegasus software. While the Israel-based company denied the allegations, various investigations, including Khashoggi’s murder case, found that victims had the software inserted in their phones through various means. As I said earlier, this goes to show how easy it is to target even top-level people, and that they need to improve their security practices. Bezos’ phone was hacked and he had to endure personal and financial loss as he kept his individual and business data on the same phone. In 2017, it was reported that US President Donald Trump used a five-year-old Samsung phone with outdated software. Last year, CNN reported that Trump continued using a personal phone despite several warnings from security officials. In 2016, it was found that Mark Zuckerberg used ‘dadada’ as the password of several social networks.
— thaddeus e. grugq (@thegrugq) January 22, 2020 The security community on Twitter suggested that Bezos should’ve used a burner phone to chat with Saudis, and keep a separate phone to store personal data. Not a bad idea at all.
