Jeff Bezos’ investigator thinks Saudi Arabia hacked his cell phone — here’s how it could have happened

A $1 billion Israeli intelligence startup accused of helping Saudi Arabia track its adversaries could be the key to new assertions from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ security consultant Gavin de Becker.

In an op-ed published in The Daily Beast on Saturday, de Becker said his team concluded that Saudi Arabia “had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private information,” following its investigation into how Bezos’ texts with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez ended up in the hands of The National Enquirer.

A foreign government surveilling a powerful American CEO using advanced technologies? It sounds like the stuff of a spy novel.

But as it turns out, tracking people’s cell phones is a well-established practice, and the technology behind it — known as “lawful intercept spyware” — is a $12 billion industry.

Software can track texts, emails and apps

While De Becker stopped short of asserting how Saudi Arabia accessed Bezos’ phone, his op-ed linked out to a New York Times article on “internet mercenaries” including NSO Group, DarkMatter, and Black Cube — companies which use technological prowess to put advanced spying techniques in the hands of governments around the globe.

The most established is NSO Group, $1 billion Israeli startup that’s open about its mission to help “government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.’

NSO Group was founded in 2008 by Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie to help cell phone providers gain access to their customer’s phones to perform maintenance.

Since then, the company has helped Saudi Arabia “track its adversaries,” helped Mexico “hunt drug kingpins,” and made millions of dollars doing similar work for dozens of different governments, according to an investigation by the Times.

NSO Group’s main technology Pegasus came out in 2011. Pegasus lets its users collect remote data from smartphone apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype, as well as texts, emails, calls and location data, from “the air without leaving a trace,” according to the Times.

While helping Mexico catch drug criminals is within NSO Group’s stated mission, the company is at the center of a lawsuit which alleges its technology was used by Saudi Arabia to spy on journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

NSO Group has also worked with the United Arab Emirates, which was caught installing NSO’s software on the cell phone of human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor, according to the Times.

A spokeswoman for NSO said its technology was not used on Bezos.

“We can say unequivocally that our technology was not used in this instance. We know this because our software cannot be used on US phone numbers,” the spokeswoman said. “Our technology, which is only licensed to prevent or investigate crime and terror, was not used by any of our customers to target Mr. Bezos’ phone.”

NSO faces steep competition

NSO Group isn’t the only player in the international spy space.

The Times uncovered steep competition between NSO Group and the Emirati firm DarkMatter, which reportedly formed after an American firm CyberPoint declined the UAE’s requests to break American law by cracking encryption codes and hacking websites housed on American servers.

DarkMatter’s stated mission is to create a world “where businesses and governments harness and maximise the benefits of the digital environment effectively and safely.”

But its techniques go beyond just tracking people’s cell phones. The firm reportedly hacked a baby monitor in the home of Mansoor in order to listen in on his conversations.

Read More



from Trend News Web https://ift.tt/2TIoSfH

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Allred: Tape appears to show R. Kelly sexually abusing girls

A man who said he was cleaning out an old videotape collection found what he thought was a recording of R&B singer R. Kelly in concert, but instead turned out to show a man who appeared to be Kelly sexually abusing girls, he and his attorney said Sunday. The man then turned the tape over to law enforcement, according to attorney Gloria Allred. She and her client, Gary Dennis, would not discuss the specifics of the tape during a news conference in New York. But Allred said it appears to show a separate incident from the 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse that Kelly faces in Chicago, though she acknowledged she could not be “100 percent certain” that the man in the tape is Kelly. Steve Greenberg, an attorney for Kelly, noted that lack of certainty. “The doubt here is self-evident, with reporting that the man on the tape kinda, sorta looks like R. Kelly,” Greenberg said Sunday in an email. “That doesn’t make it him. It is not him.” The lawyer also said Kelly “denies that he is
Read more

Ranking Every No. 1 NBA Draft Pick from the Last 30 Years

Image
Gary Dineen/Getty Images 15. Larry Johnson, Charlotte Hornets, 1991 Johnson, an athletic marvel, came into the league with incalculable potential. He was Rookie of the Year in 1992, made the All-Star team in his second season and signed a 12-year, $84 million contract in 1993 that was the   largest   in league history at the time. Back problems sapped his bounce, but Johnson developed skills to compensate. The power forward shot 38.6 percent from deep and averaged 18.8 points, 7.2 rebounds and 4.6 assists in 1994-95 while making his second All-Star team. He was just as good the next year, posting averages of 20.5 points, 8.4 rebounds and 4.4 assists. Though decline set in following his move to the Knicks in 1996, Johnson was an effective player for the balance of his 10-year career. He ranks   10th   among No. 1 picks in the last 30 years with 69.7 win shares.          14. John Wall , Washington Wizards, 2010 Wall’s average of 9.2 assists is tops on our list, and his 1.7 ste
Read more

Attacks and bodyguards: The price of being a Colombian journalist

Image
Caucasia, Colombia – Leiderman Ortiz’s mother, sister, brother and nephew were visiting him in Caucasia in May 2010 when a loud blast went off outside the house where they were asleep. “I jumped out of my bed and started shouting, ‘Stay down, don’t move’,” Ortiz said. “My poor mother was screaming. She was terrified.” Unlike many others who have been targeted by the regular grenade attacks in Caucasia, a small city about 670km north of the Colombian capital Bogota, Ortiz isn’t a criminal. He writes about them. And the 2010 attack was the third of at least five known attempts or suspected attempts on the 45-year-old’s life. The first occurred in 2009 in Medellin when he was leaving an office and an armed individual was waiting for him. Ortiz saw the individual and called the police. The next year, the 2010 grenade attack occurred. Two days after that attack, another grenade was thrown into his garden. The following year, at least two suspected hitmen were paid to follow Ortiz, but
Read more