What Can Jeff Bezos Teach Us About Cyber Security?

You hopefully know who Jeff Bezos is. He is the founder and CEO of Amazon and also has the distinction of being the world’s richest person. Well, maybe not as he underwent a messy divorce with his wife as a result of his own infidelities owing to a tryst with Los Angeles TV news anchor and actress Lauren Sanchez. What made this more newsworthy was that Bezos was then allegedly extorted by the tabloid National Enquirer when they came into possession of (to put it nicely) sensitive pictures of Bezos’ person as well as some salacious text messages. So what can this teach us?

Well, the first is not to have an affair. At best it puts you in a compromising position and at worst it opens you up for blackmail. That is not the major lesson in this though.

Access To The Best Technology

Bezos, being the then-world’s richest man and the head of one of the largest companies in the world should have access to any and all technology available not only on the market but not on the market as well. Amazon has cyber security ingrained into everything that it does. Everything that he has should be secure. His personal phone should be about as unhackable as any piece of technology on the planet, shouldn’t it?

Granted nothing is unhackable but yes. He should have security layers on top of security protocols all protected by an impenetrable firewall. So how did he get hacked which led to the sensitive images being leaked?

You Are Only As Secure As The People Around You

It is quite simple actually he wasn’t hacked. All of the technology in the world cannot work as intended if there is a weak link and that weak link is the human being using it. This is not a new idea either. Humans have been the weak link in cyber security ever since the first cyber attacks were recorded.

Think about it. Bezos was of course stupid enough to send compromising images of his person to another individual. He has no idea if that person’s device is secure and yet he did it anyway. A security expert hired by Bezos believed that the leak may have come not from Bezos’ end but on Sanchez’s end and pointed the finger at Sanchez’s brother Michael. It is possible that the information sent to her was able to be shared to others and that Michael took the information and ran with it. Her brother is apparently a supporter of Donald Trump and an acquaintance of the embattled Roger Stone and may have had an axe to grind with Bezos, who owns the anti-Trump Washington Post.

Who Has Access?

Of course this is not confirmed but it teaches us all a valuable lesson. The images were saved on Sanchez’s phone and Sanchez may have thought that she had not granted access to anyone but made a mistake and inadvertently granted access to others like her brother. Her brother, who may not like Bezos, saw them and sought to embarrass him or extort him. Either way Sanchez granting access to someone she may not have intended to is the most likely reason and experts are going with that for one reason: Bezos has not filed a lawsuit since a mistake like this is not a crime.

Humans Are The Weak Link

Humans are the weakest link when it comes to cyber security. Think about what you do with your computer systems. You may have to share files with an outside party or with clients. Are their systems secure? You may have no idea. Sharing permissions are an easy thing to overlook and yet could allow someone access to your system that should not have access to it. Preventing something like this is a major part of PCI compliance. Thieves and cyber criminals use tactics like this to gain access to systems all of the time and far too many people fall for it. Or it could just be an old employee that wants to make trouble for you.

Of course there is also another explanation for this as well. It is quite possible that Lauren Sanchez wanted to accelerate the end to Bezos’ marriage so she could become the wife of the then-world’s richest man and did this intentionally. She has since divorced her own husband. It is possible to be hurt by those closest to you. Make sure that your employees and anyone who has access to your system understand that you want to keep your business as secure as possible and that they play a major role in that. But don’t become lax, they may have access to your most sensitive information so remember, not all of them may need access to it. Permissions work only if applied correctly.