ProPublica: “A glitch in the smartphone app used to count and report votes from individual precincts continues to delay results from Monday’s Iowa caucuses. But a closer look shows that the app had a potentially graver problem that apparently did not come into play: its vulnerability to hacking.”

“The IowaReporterApp was so insecure that vote totals, passwords and other sensitive information could have been intercepted or even changed, according to officials at Massachusetts-based Veracode, a security firm that reviewed the software at ProPublica’s request.”

“Facebook officials say they try to avoid political bias. Try telling that to Democrats,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The relationship between the company and the political left is at an all-time low, more than a dozen Democratic operatives, campaign officials and leaders of progressive groups said in interviews, following a series of company policy decisions widely seen among their ranks as favoring President Trump. Many Democrats and campaign officials are increasingly criticizing Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in personal terms.”

Hillary Clinton told The Atlantic that she’s horrified and alarmed by what she views as Mark Zuckerberg’s unwillingness to battle the spread of disinformation and propaganda on Facebook.

Said Clinton: “It’s Trumpian. It’s authoritarian.”

“If it weren’t for impeachment, the country’s biggest story would be allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hacked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ phone,” Axios reports.

“This would be the nominal leader of an American ally spying on the head of one of America’s largest companies, who doubles as the owner of one of America’s most influential media outlets.”

“The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone ‘hacked’ in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia,” the Guardian reports.

“The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man… Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours.”

Washington Post: “Area 1 Security, a California cybersecurity company, said it discovered on New Year’s Eve that the GRU had launched a successful cyber ‘phishing’ campaign against Burisma Holdings, as well as several subsidiaries and partners, so that hackers could gain access to internal email accounts.”

“The GRU is the entity that hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta in 2016, releasing their emails that summer and fall at strategically inopportune times for the victims. If the Russian government releases hacked materials from Burisma, how will the media cover it and how would politicians react compared to four years ago? What if the Russians put out fabricated emails that look like they’re authentic but are intended only to sow disinformation about the son of a leading Democratic presidential candidate?”

“It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype,” the New York Times reports.

“But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones.”