Security News
Cybersecurity experts said Thursday there were still many unanswered questions from an investigation commissioned by Jeff Bezos that concluded the billionaire's cellphone was hacked, apparently after receiving a video file with malicious spyware from the WhatsApp account of Saudi Arabia's crown prince. The report further pointed to messages later sent from the prince's WhatsApp account to Bezos that showed "Apparent awareness" of private information.
Researchers who took part this week in the Zero Day Initiative's Pwn2Own Miami hacking competition have earned a total of $280,000 for exploits targeting industrial control systems and associated protocols. The teams and individuals who signed up for the hacking contest were Incite Team, Flashback Team, Claroty Research, Ben McBride, Fabius Artrel, Michael Stepankin, Lucas Georges, and a nameless team comprising Tobias Scharnowski, Niklas Breitfeld, and Ali Abbasi from the Horst Goertz Institute for IT-Security in Germany.
The latest edition of the ISMG Security Report offers an analysis of fresh details on the hacking of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' iPhone. Also featured: an update on Microsoft's exposure of customer...
The very first Pwn2Own hacking competition that exclusively focuses on the industrial control systems has kicked off in Miami. On Day One, overall, there were six successful hacking attempts and two partially successful attempts against eight hacking targets, according to ZDI. On Day Two, there were three successful hacks and two partials against four total targets.
Independent UN rights experts said Wednesday they had received information that Amazon owner Jeff Bezos's phone was hacked through a WhatsApp account belonging to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. "The alleged hacking of Mr Bezos's phone, and those of others, demands immediate investigation by US and other relevant authorities," UN Special Rapporteurs Agnes Callamard and David Kaye said in a statement in Geneva.
Candid pictures used to threaten Amazon boss Jeff Bezos were exposed not by his current paramour's brother, as some believe, but through a sophisticated hacking operation personally directed by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, The Guardian suggests. The paper today claims to have been told by anonymous sources that Bezos' phone was hacked using a WhatsApp message from the personal account of bin Salman himself.
Brazilian prosecutors on Tuesday accused U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald of involvement in hacking the phones of officials involved in a corruption investigation, but said court rulings protecting free speech prevent them from bringing charges. Greenwald's The Intercept Brasil published excerpts from conversations involving Justice Minister Sérgio Moro, saying they showed the then-judge was improperly coordinating with prosecutors at the time he was a judge overseeing a vast corruption investigation.
The US military claims to have "Successfully" disrupted the online propaganda efforts of the Islamic State in a hacking operation dating back at least to 2016, according to declassified national security documents released Tuesday. The heavily redacted, previously top secret documents said the US Cyber Command "Successfully contested ISIS in the information domain" and limited its online efforts on radicalization and recruitment "By imposing time and resource costs" on the jihadist group.
So said Shelby Pierson, the election security threats executive for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, speaking at an Election Assistance Commission event earlier this month. It's probably a good idea for the FBI to warn local and state election officials of hacking attempts, and last week, it announced just that.
TikTok, a mobile video app popular with teens, was vulnerable to SMS spoofing attacks that could have led to the extraction of private information, according to infosec researchers. If the user clicked that malicious link, the attacker could access the user's TikTok account and, so Check Point said, manipulate its content by deleting videos, uploading new videos and making private or "Hidden" videos public.