Facebook Amazon Tiff: A New Skirmish
January 27, 2020
Not long ago, Werner Vogels (CTO of the Bezos bulldozer) asked a Facebook wizard a question about its data policies. The irony of the question is that it seems to have been asked when the news about the alleged hacking of Mr. Bezos’ mobile device.
Well, there seems to be some tension in the air. Mashable published “Facebook Official Struggles to Explain Bezos’ WhatsApp Hack.” The story asserts:
When asked about WhatsApp’s security in the wake of reports that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia hacked the Amazon CEO’s phone via a WhatsApp message, Clegg seemed to struggle with defending the messaging app’s security.
Here’s the passage we noted:
“It sounds like something on the, you know, what they call the operating, the operating, the phone itself,” he sputtered. “It can’t have been, it can’t have been anything on the, when the message was sent in transit, because that’s end-to-end encrypted on WhatsApp…. It’s a bit like if someone sends you a malicious email, it only comes to life when you open it. I suspect it must have been something like that, so something would have affected the phone operating system.
Mashable does the real news thing, stating:
The issue with this explanation? While it’s convenient in keeping Facebook’s long-running beef with Apple alive, it ignores the fact that WhatsApp is vulnerable to spyware and other security flaws.
DarkCyber’s view is that the tensions between Amazon and Facebook are likely to increase. That may be the big story.
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2020
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