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These 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 matte
by leroy_masochist 8y ago
These 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.