Jared Kushner Hacked Phone Reveals Secret Negotiations, Millions in Transactions
- ID
- 38672
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 23 Oct 2026, 5:24 AM
- Fetched
- 23 Oct 2026, 4:59 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-kushner-hacked-phone-secret-negotiations
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 23 Oct 2026, 5:01 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
A Vanity Fair excerpt from Matthew Cole's book "Princes and Thieves" claims the Dutch military intelligence service (MIVD) accessed Jared Kushner's iPhone and monitored him using a Dubai-based bank account holding hundreds of millions of dollars routed from an Azerbaijani bank, with transfers to a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man — more than $700 million in transfers. The alleged access chain: the Dutch turned a GRU operative specialising in stolen bank data who was travelling to the UK, and he gave them access to a Rostov-based GRU server where they found screenshots of Kushner's iPhone. The excerpt, as supplied, stops before describing how the phone itself was penetrated.
Why it matters
There is no actionable technical detail here for builders — the text does not describe the exploit, the iOS version, or the attack vector, so you cannot patch or reconfigure anything based on it. The one concrete observation worth noting is that the reported artefact was iPhone screenshots sitting on an adversary's server, not a zero-day: it is a reminder that what leaks is often what got captured to the screen. Malaysia relevance: none stated in the text; no local policy, funding, infrastructure or startup angle is present.
Discussion angle
The HN thread drew 409 points and 173 comments, but the excerpt names no exploit and no iOS version — worth asking the room whether a hacking story with no technical mechanism still counts as useful security reading, or whether it is just a politics story wearing a security headline.