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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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday January 26 2020, @10:10PM (3 children)
I cringe every time I hear the phrase "download our free app" because I know what they really mean is "download our free app/spyware". They aren't making that crap app available for free out of the goodness of their heart. It IS going to spy on you in one way or another, and it will either advertise to you or serve as a valuable placeholder for advertising that they can sell later on. (Grow a large user base and then rape them all. Standard business practice). But the part that really pisses me off is how the media continuously hammers this idea in to people's heads that always downloading apps to their toy phone is a good thing.
Of course, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if people just wouldn't put every stupid little detail about themselves in a fucking computerized "phone".
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @10:38PM (2 children)
Linux, openoffice gimp ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @03:27AM
Those are but a few exceptional drops in a large ocean.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @06:55PM
Free as in beer. Which really isn't free, somones just trying to get you drunk.
Free as in free knowledge. Which really is free, but very boring.