If The World's Richest Man Isn't Safe On WhatsApp, How Worried Should Rest Of Us Be?

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had his phone "hacked" in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, according to a sensational report by The Guardian.

That's right -- the phone used by the world's richest man was penetrated into by a simple WhatsApp message. What does that tell you about online security?

Reuters

The issue has caused somewhat of a diplomatic storm, with two United Nations experts expected to release a public statement to address the "serious allegations," as per The New York Times.

What exactly happened?

Apparently an encrypted WhatsApp message from the number allegedly used by Mohammed bin Salman seemingly had a malicious file that infiltrated Jeff Bezos' phone, according to a digital forensic analysis.

On May 1, 2018, Jeff Bezos supposedly received a video over WhatsApp, from the number used by the Saudi Crown Prince, after which the Amazon CEO's phone began to send unusually large amounts of data to an online server, the New York Times quoted unidentified people who know about the Jeff Bezos-ordered forensic analysis of his phone.

If you aren't aware, there's a lot of bad blood between Jeff Bezos-owned The Washington Post and its critical reporting of the current Saudi government. A critic of the Saudi regime, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in a Saudi embassy -- the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered Khashoggi's killing.

Twitter

While all of this is happening, the Saudi government has officially denied any involvement in Jeff Bezos' phone hacking allegation. Clearly, we haven't heard the end of this story just yet.

WhatsApp's security crisis

It's fair to say that this incident has once again brought into light WhatsApp's security, a topic which continues to raise more questions than answers, unfortunately.

Earlier in November 2019, WhatsApp came clean on being hacked, admitting that security and privacy of 1400 individuals across several continents was being compromised by a spying software. Hackers used WhatsApp's voice calling function to merely ring a target's phone, and that's all it needed for the spyware to covertly install itself on the intended device -- scarily enough, this exploit bypassed any need to have the call answered on the other end.

Before that in October 2019, a security researcher called 'Awakened' found a bug on the popular messaging app -- a vulnerability in WhatsApp that could give hackers access to any phone, if they were to download an infected GIF image.

Reuters

And now even someone like Jeff Bezos seemingly fell prey to a WhatsApp message, after he clicked on a video file sent in it -- another old exploit in WhatsApp that's now patched. If the richest man in the world can't be safe, then who's really safe anywhere anymore?

It can be argued that WhatsApp is merely the vehicle of infiltration -- that inherently it's not insecure. After all, in the era of personal computers, it was Microsoft Windows that was hacked relentlessly; in the smartphone age, it's Android and iOS that's targeted by hackers. That hackers just choose the most popular delivery vehicles to target as many people as they can, enhancing their odds of success.

And what better way to hack into phones right now than WhatsApp, which enjoys over 400 million users in India, and hundreds of million more globally? Also what happens when it's not just a random hacker but the government that wants to see what's going on inside your phone? Like I said, all of this raises more questions than answers.

While we demand greater accountability from companies like WhatsApp (and Facebook) that enable and expose us online in equal measure, the immediate lesson from Jeff Bezos' phone hack revelation is this: don't forget to say a little prayer, cross all appendages every time you get a WhatsApp notification.