Telegram founder suggests Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to drop WhatsApp and use his app instead - India TV News
Telegram founder suggests Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to drop WhatsApp and use his app instead - India TV News |
| Posted: 30 Jan 2020 11:34 PM PST  Telegram founder suggests Bezos to use his app. Private instant messaging app Telegram's founder Pavel Durov has said Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' data may not have been hacked if he had relied on Telegram instead of Facebook-owned WhatsApp which is full of malicious "backdoor" bugs. Facebook has blamed Apple's operating system for the hacking of Bezos' phone, saying WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is unhackable. Investigators believe that Bezos's iPhone was compromised after he received a 4.4MB video file containing malware via WhatsApp - in the same way when phones of 1,400 select journalists and human rights activists were broken into by Pegasus software from Israel-based NSO Group last year. "WhatsApp's 'corrupt video' vulnerability was present not only on iOS, but also on Android and even Windows Phone devices. Meaning, on all mobile devices with WhatsApp installed," Durov wrote in a blog post late Thursday. "This security fault was not present in other messaging apps on iOS. Had Jeff Bezos relied on Telegram instead of WhatsApp, he wouldn't have been blackmailed by people who compromised his communications," he added. According to Durov, WhatsApp uses the words "end-to-end encryption" as some magic incantation that alone is supposed to automatically make all communications secure. However, this technology "is not a silver bullet that can guarantee you absolute privacy by itself". According to Durov, there are backdoors that are camouflaged as "accidental" security flaws and may lead to such instances. "Enforcement agencies are not too happy with encryption, forcing app developers to secretly plant vulnerabilities in their apps. I know that because we've been approached by some of them -- and refused to cooperate. As a result, Telegram is banned in some countries where WhatsApp has no issues with authorities, most suspiciously in Russia and Iran," noted Durov. In an interview to the BBC last week, Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, Nick Clegg, said it wasn't WhatsApp's fault because end-to-end encryption is unhackable and blamed Apple's operating system for Bezos' episode. "It sounds like something on the... you know, what they call the operate, operated on the phone itself. It can't have been anything, when the message was sent, in transit, because that's end-to-end encrypted on WhatsApp," Clegg had told the show host. According to a report from FTI Consulting, a firm that has investigated Bezos' phone, after that the video file was received, Bezos' phone started sending unusually large amounts of outbound data, including his intimate messages with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez. According to Clegg, "something" must have affected the phone's operating system. "Consequently, the issue was not iOS-specific, but WhatsApp specific," replied Durov. "Telegram rolled out end-to-end encryption for mass communication years before WhatsApp followed suit, and we've been mindful not only of the strengths, but also the limitations of this technology. Other aspects of a messaging app can render end-to-end encryption useless. Below are three examples of what can go wrong," he added. The fact that Apple was forced by the FBI to abandon encryption plans for iCloud is telling. "That's one of the reasons why Telegram never relies on third-party cloud backups, and Secret Chats are never backed up anywhere," said the Telegram founder. WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users globally while Telegram has 200-300 million users. "Some could say that, as a founder of a rival app, I may be biased when criticizing WhatsApp. Of course, I am. Of course, I consider Telegram Secret Chats to be significantly more secure than any competing means of communication – why else would I be developing and using Telegram?"  |
| Everything We Know About the Jeff Bezos Phone Hack - WIRED Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:00 AM PST  On November 8, 2018, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos received an unexpected text message over WhatsApp from Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman. The two had exchanged numbers several months prior, in April, at a small dinner in Los Angeles, but weren't in regular contact; Bezos had previously received only a video file from the crown prince in May that reportedly extolled Saudi Arabia's economy. The November text had an attachment as well: an image of a woman who looked like Lauren Sanchez, with whom Bezos had been having an unreported affair. That message appears to have been a taunt; American Media Inc., publisher of The National Inquirer, would several months later make details of the affair public. But it's the initial contact, in May, that has set off another firestorm with MBS at the center. That video file was likely loaded with malware, investigators now say. The crown prince's own account had been used to hack Bezos' phone. Such brazen targeting of a private citizen—the richest man in the world, no less—is alarming to say the least. It underscores the dangers of an unchecked private market for digital surveillance, and raises serious questions about other prominent US figures who have known relationships with the crown prince, like White House adviser Jared Kushner and President Donald Trump himself. "This reported surveillance of Mr. Bezos, allegedly through software developed and marketed by a private company and transferred to a government without judicial control of its use, is, if true, a concrete example of the harms that result from the unconstrained marketing, sale, and use of spyware," United Nations special rapporteurs David Kaye and Agnes Callamard said in a statement. Details provided by the UN suggest that the malware originated from a private vendor, such as Israel's NSO Group or the Italian Hacking Team. The tie to MBS was first reported Tuesday by The Guardian. Bezos became a Saudi target not because of Amazon but for his ownership of The Washington Post, which had published a series of critical stories about the kingdom. The November text from MBS came one month after Saudi officials murdered Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi inside the country's Istanbul consulate. The UN probe into the attack on Bezos is based at least in part on a forensics analysis commissioned by Bezos himself and completed by FTI Consulting, a cybersecurity consulting firm. The findings are not definitive, and the firm ranked them at medium to high confidence. Similarly, the UN made clear that while its investigation indicated these results, attribution is not certain. "All FTI Consulting client work is confidential. We do not comment on, confirm, or deny client engagements or potential engagements," the firm told WIRED in a statement. The Saudi embassy denied the allegations on Twitter Tuesday evening: "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." According to the UN's findings, the Saudi regime began exfiltrating large amounts of data from Bezos within hours of sending the tainted MP4 video file. FTI Consulting found that six months before the video download, an average of about 430 kilobytes of data came from Bezos' phone per day, a small amount. Within hours of receiving the video, that number rose and the phone started averaging 101 megabytes for months afterward. The UN reports that this number sometimes even jumped into the gigabyte range, several orders of magnitude over the pre-hack baseline—indicating data exfiltration through malware. The UN report points to Pegasus malware, developed by the cyberarms dealer NSO Group, which has adapted it for use on numerous iOS and Android versions over the past four years. Saudi Arabia first bought Pegasus from NSO Group in November 2017, according to the UN. Investigators suggest Galileo, a Hacking Team product, as another possibility. Analysis of those tools by third-party and academic researchers have shown that both are capable of compromising a device and accessing almost any data on it, from text messages, calls, contacts, and emails to apps, browsing history, and even location data.  |
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