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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 26 2020, @06:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-not-to-do dept.

What Jeff Bezos Can Teach You About Smartphone Security:

Jeff Bezos might be (much) wealthier than you, but he's not smarter than you—at least, not when it comes to basic smartphone security. As you probably read and laughed at (and then sighed at, after you looked up how much Bezos makes each minute), Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently sent Bezos a video file via WhatsApp. This file actually "contained malware that penetrated Bezos's mobile phone and exfiltrated a large amount of data within hours," describes The Guardian.

[...] As The New York Times notes, it's not even clear whether Bezos opened the video file (and malware) himself, or whether the simple act of receiving it was enough to exploit a vulnerability in WhatsApp. In other words, the simple act of receiving malicious code, buried in an innocent piece of content, is enough. You could do everything you can to not engage with it, but it might not even matter—unless you avoid the message entirely, which is contrary to the point of a messaging app.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 26 2020, @07:05PM (3 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday January 26 2020, @07:05PM (#948963) Journal

    I thought the real lesson was don't use WhatsApp? What's up with that? :-)

    You've got to wonder, why would people like Bezos and Gates even need any sort of social media or social media messaging account? If you don't already have their phone number, they don't want to talk to you.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 26 2020, @08:04PM (2 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday January 26 2020, @08:04PM (#948976) Homepage

    Whatsapp is an Israeli spyware invention spread through inorganic hype, like a lot of other things with Israeli and/or Jewish origin.

    Personally, when somebody asks me to install one of those apps, I can tell them to fuck off and send me a standard SMS text message or with large files use something like Dropbox or Mega that's external to the phone. I don't need to install another fucking app just to send and receive texts.

    B-but MUH SIGNAL

    There are a gazillion different things in the average phone that spy on you. If you can't trust any link in the chain then the whole chain is untrustworthy. Keeping your texts secret doesn't mean shit as long as there's something else storing your keypresses. And I doubt we'll ever see functional phones with the deep state out of both the hardware and ISPs that are allowed to actually be useful over the network.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:51PM (1 child)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:51PM (#949015) Journal
      Don't know why someone modded you troll initially ... have an upmod
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      • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday January 27 2020, @05:48PM

        by Osamabobama (5842) on Monday January 27 2020, @05:48PM (#949426)

        Don't know why someone modded you troll initially

        Oooh! I know why -- it's name recognition. He has a fan club, of sorts.

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