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Care to guess how CIA did it? I think MBS knows he's a target of secret services...I doubt he sent a normal, unencrypted sms text.
by onetimemanytime 8y ago
Care to guess how CIA did it? I think MBS knows he's a target of secret services...I doubt he sent a normal, unencrypted sms text.
- amerine 8y agoWhy do you think that?
- onetimemanytime 8y agoA head of state such as SA, known to buy latest tech and hacking tools, to use un-encrypted messages? I'm wondering if CIA has a way in encrypted chats and only uses that info in rare instances--and even then without confirming anything. But MBS knows what he used...
- ianai 8y agoOr they used any of a number of more traditional methods to surveil him. Hidden cameras, spies, etc
- baybal2 8y agoThere was a bank in Russia that hired a dude better known under a moniker "Pchela" to enforce use of pgp, and infosec in general. He devised a plan under which staff is trained, tested, and punished for incompliance. Once the whole of banks ~1200 people staff got certified, they set a deadline for enforcement after which anybody caught will be fired on spot. The day after the deadline they spotted ~60 people in the bank sending plaintext, or replying to an unsigned email. And among them, one director level employee. They had to fire them all, including a directress who went on trying to suing them for years.
- baybal2 8y agoI wanted to say here that powerful and smart people are not immune at all to doing stupid things if they have no discipline.
- misnome 8y agoThis sounds interesting, but I can't seem to find the story. Any other information to help track it down?
- baybal2 8y agoThat's an account I got first hand. The bank in question is Asia Pacific Bank. A small regional bank in Russian far east.
- vehementi 8y agoOr, they murder people with such frequency and lack of consequence that, why bother encrypting? Why would anyone pay attention this time?
- kenny87 8y agoyeah sad, but true.
- leroy_masochist 8y agoThese guys are not exactly masters of tradecraft; look at the wet work team's ham-handed attempt to impersonate Khashoggi leaving the embassy. Or for that matter, pretty much any aspect of that whole operation. Smooth operators they are not. Also, the KSA is basically a one-man dictatorship at this point. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the Saudi COMSEC guy is not giving MBS a stern talking-to every time he does impulsive 31-year-old dictator stuff like, for example, using unsecure messaging services to communicate with his goons while they're murdering a dissident overseas.
- jocoda 8y ago... or it could be simple arrogance. The certainty that there would be no comebacks or consequences ...
- onetimemanytime 8y agoafter reading https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzjmze/saud-al-qahtani-saudi-arabia-hacking-team https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzjmze/saud-al-qa... I think they are screwed, too much money and no in house INFOSEC. Whoever they hire, is likely to be in touch with foreign secret services before they do the job. The fact that they have a common fixer posting on forums to buy zero days is very amateurish and shows their sorry state. USA, Russia, China, UK etc all have homegrown expert with security clearances doing that stuff. Maybe MBS is too dumb to use open source apps like Signal, who knows?
- kenny87 8y agoyeah, we often overestimate the general OPSEC awareness and measures these guys take. I mean doing this in a foreign embassy, in Turkey of all places, in the foyer? When I worked overseas our security people told us to assume everything is bugged ... they swept the SCIF everyday, and before any meeting where sensitive information is discussed. Basically, anything not in the SCIF is capable of being monitored/hacked by intelligence services.
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- ryanlol 8y ago>known to buy latest tech and hacking tools, to use un-encrypted messages? Google “nokia2mon”, the saudis are definitely not masters of tradecraft. He was very active on a US based hacking forum for years, and everyone knew he worked for KSA.
- arcticfox 8y agoIf anyone's curious, it took me a minute to find: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzjmze/saud-al-qahtani-saudi-arabia-hacking-team https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzjmze/saud-al-qa...
- mbesto 8y agoHillary Clinton, the secretary of state for arguably the most technically advanced country in the world used a private server to send classified information. Assumptions like these are dangerous. Note - do not turn this into a "but her emails" discussion.
- AJ007 8y agoA non technical person who has access to droves of intelligence gleaned from spying may be unaware that they have nothing but a very superficial comprehension as to what is actually going on. I would venture to say that a great number of leaders in the west, east, developed and developing countries could not describe how a computer works. Don’t bother asking them about encryption.
- jf- 8y agoIt’s paywalled, so I can’t see what what kind of messages they were, e.g. sms, whatsapp etc. Even though it seems stupid for someone in his position to send ordinary texts, he may not know that. Think of trump using his own phone to tweet.
- garmaine 8y agoIt’s pay walled, but the text I can see gives no indication that the cia could read the text. Just that at least 11 messages were sent. Sounds like traffic analysis.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago11 messages with a few hours before /after? makes sense, and let the Saudis think that we know the what the messages say. If he sent e message every 3 days normally and then sent 11 the day of the killing...
- garmaine 8y agoThese are messages between MBS and the guy organizing the killing, not MBS messages generally which would be rather circumstantial.
- clickme_zsh 8y agohttps://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox - for firefox https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome - for chrome
- gonzo41 8y agoprobably a rootkit on the device to catch the message before transit. Though I wonder if tools like TEMPEST work for mobile phone screens.
- yodon 8y agoPutting a root kit on a head of state's phone would be a great way to have your penetration discovered, so it's probably not the route they took, and TEMPEST wouldn't work on phone screens as it was a 1980's technique targeting the RF emissions of CRT displays common then (and which were fundamentally different in nature from modern solid state displays).
- sorokod 8y agoShould be pretty easy if US was involved in setting up the Saudi government's infosec
- crispyambulance 8y agoGiven that the target was going to the embassy to get a marriage license, I believe that MBS deliberately wanted to spread fear by disappearing a journalist. I think MBS very much expected to be found out, but likely assumed that it would not be such a public spectacle in US media with actual implementation details. Trump played along with it as much as he could.
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