we hear from the heads of the new york stock exchange and nasdaq on market sentiment for tech firms going public. first, to our top story. researchers are not sure exactly what infected amazon ceo jeff bezos's phone after rows of -- revelations it was hacked. suspected -- forensic experts detected a massive spike in data being siphoned from it. hours after bezos received a what's up message from a saudi royal. the malware behind mac remains a mystery. to discuss in washington, marcus fowler, director of strategic threat at ai conformity. and in studio is our reporter. let me start with you. we have had a few days to digest all of this. what do we know about the malware that was implanted in that video message via what's up? >> we have not hurt -- not learned a whole lot. other than the chronology of hout jeff bezos's phone was attacked. he met with the crowd -- the saudi crown prince in 2018, they exchanged numbers. he received this message that presumably included malware, spyware that corrupted his phone. followed analysis has and shown that it -- there was this massive spike in the data being transmitted out of his phone. up to millions of times what it would be ordinarily. the question remains exactly what does the malware look like? and what will be the way forward to protect against similar attacks. what we don't know is the malware was embedded to a downloader that was encrypted on whatsapp, the analysis looking inside of that. the researchers need to break into the phone here that is what is next. taylor: marcus, let me bring you in. your note points out that this is not a jeff bezos problem, this is a global leader problem and you think about all of the people that potentially could be at risk. what do you make of this being a bigger issue that we are thinking about? marcus: absolutely. very sophisticated attack. andy relationship with an application like whatsapp is very advanced. it is the next generation of the classic spearfishing. we know the vulnerabilities via email in these areas are greatest when it comes from our contacts and they take advantage of our communications. our relationships with these apps is different. the speed with which we read and move on, you get you might evaluate it. you get a chat, you move through it quickly. the usage of this is prolific across any number of industries and senior leadership. taylor: marcus, a follow-up here, you seem to note this attack from people that are in our inner circle are on the rise. why? just because it is easier? marcus: sure. when we think about a spearfishing attack or a cyberattack, you think of it coming right at you. the vulnerability, especially if you are a senior official or individual with a high security posture, you are more likely to be targeted indirectly. friends, family, so's associates associates. your vulnerability is greater and the security posture lowers and you are likely to click on something that appears that it comes from a trusted confidant, one of your children. this is another way to attack and go after their primary target. taylor: this seems to be a differing type. the last time you and i spoke, we were talking about iran. a massive cyberwar warfare on the grid. how has the type of spyware evolved over time where this is a bigger threat? kartikay: what is interesting is that it is unclear exactly how this malware has evolved. the industry and the space behind spyware has certainly changed in the last decade or so. in the past, we saw spyware as part of a cyber toolkit that might be throwaway tools used by a hacker. downloaded on the dark web. now, fast forward 10 years later, you have sophisticated companies with valuations worth hundreds of millions of dollars doing business with nationstates doing -- willing to play millions for these tools. at the same time, you have the apps we use every day in the operating systems getting smarter about defending against attacks, which makes any vulnerabilities and the ability to hack into these vulnerabilities more valuable. hackers might save these exploits for a rainy day or when they have a valuable low hanging fruit target as was the case with mr. bezos. taylor: how do you see ai helping to enhance the defense? let's say i trust someone and i'm a human so i can't read the malicious form of communication. do you cai playing an important role there? marcus: absolutely. you hit on it in the beginning. we talked about the spike in activity after the download. it is that it -- is that anonymous -- anomaly detection that artificial intelligence can play an increasing role. we have seen it be successful at the corporate space, whether it is iot or industrial in these other areas. we have seen artificial intelligence being able to provide us that anomaly dissection. what we talk about here that happen on jeff bezos's phone was a dramatic change. really, more granularity into hundreds of different attributes, you have created a lot of insight into what is happening. no matter what that threat or attack looks like, you are protected or you are aware of what is happening within your device, within your digital enterprise, across your network. that is going to be keep moving forward. taylor: i can't have you here without talking about any implications this may have on the 2020 elections, if you think about hacking into someone's individual phone like a presidential candidate for instance. it is kartikay:. devicesinds or in the of influential decision-makers in the u.s. be it a presidential candidate, and member of congress, a state lawmaker who is relevant. certainly, the ability to exploit this kind of vulnerability and do so presumably without the user actually having even click on it. if that was the case here, it would be a very dangerous flaw to presumably execute in the election. taylor: marcus fowler and bloomberg technology's, thank you both for joining. shares of intel jumping thursday and after trading. they gave full revenue forecasts suggesting personal -- personal computer demand remains strong. the company says sales in 2020 are forecasted to be $73.5 billion, beating estimates of about $72 billion. coming up, what facebook is doing to avoid making the same mistakes in the 2016 election. we will hear from the company's em ea vice president next. if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. you can listen on the bloomberg cap, bloomberg.com and in the u.s. on sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪ taylor: facebook remains under fire after the cambridge analytic because scandal which came to light in 2018. it was revealed the firm had harvested the personal data of millions of people's facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political advertising purposes. as you can imagine, it remains a sensitive topic going into the 2020 election. facebook cmea vice president nicola mendelsohn assured leaders that the scandal was the thing of the past. she spoke to francine lacqua in davos. nicola: i think the mood is different this year. i think the reason it is different is because there is a more thoughtful conversation going on around how globally business, governments can be working together with the tech companies. i also think there is an acknowledgment of the investment that facebook has been making across oh many different areas, that we have had a lot of scrutiny. sometimes in the past, that scrutiny has been deserved. i think it has been good. there has also been a lot around the economic impact. what is the economic impact of the tech company? actually, there has been a lot of welcome positive reception to that. there was a research survey that came out, a report by copenhagen abenomics -- economics, looking at facebook. it talked about how the fact how in europe, we can see through small businesses, the 20 -- the small businesses out there platforms, that it has been responsible for generating over 200 billion sales in the last year. which on the economic, you look at that, that is over 3 million jobs being created. francine: when you speak to the ministers, do they ask you about regulation? how you use the data? do they ask you what your purposes? -- purpose is? nicola: we have a lot of conversations about regulation. that is something mark zuckerberg has been calling for, how we can work with governments around the world as we have been doing with a number of different governments around the world looking at the areas of regulation. we already have regulation. francine: gdpr. how has that changed facebook? nicola: it has changed us a lot. we put in a whole new process in terms of making sure that people were aware of the information that was being collected from them, who they were sharing it with. giving them options as to what they wanted to do. that is something we are continuing to evolve with. we didn't just do it in europe where it was regulated. we did it -- we thought it was a useful way of thinking about things so we rolled it around the world as well. francine: we are in a political election year in the u.s. has facebook changed the way that some of these things get pushed through? nicola: definitely. i think we have changed fundamentally in the way we elections. thinking back to the 2016 election, the threats were different to what we understand could have been imagined back then. the worlds around misted it. intelligence agencies around the world missed it. what we have done is the investments we have made, we have had units, probably over 100 different elections around the world. every time we are increasing the scrutiny we place on safety, so come this 2020 election, it will feel different. the reason being it is a thing we have introduced. we have introduced the fact that political parties have to be checked with, authorized with us. the fact when ads run for political parties that says is it paid for by that party? those ads go sit on an ads library and you can go and have a look, anybody can look and you can see the different messages that the different parties are putting out. francine: how can we be so sure that there is no manipulation interference from another site that we have not figured out? nicola: one of the other things we're looking at, we are not just waiting for elections anymore, we are looking at patents of an authentic behavior networks.m big in 2016, we took down none. in the last year, we have taken down 50. we see these different networks out there. we stay vigilant, we know it is a race to make sure that when we feel we have got better control, that there are other things i could happen. we are very alert to the risks that could be there. francine: what is the potential for ads on what's up? nicola: that is not something we are progressing at the moment. it is early days. we are making sure that the way that people are using the platform, that is a most important thing. it has grown nicely from that side. francine: what will make you decide? do you worry people will be put off it? what are you trying to figure out? nicola: we are just looking at the moment in a different way. we do test all the time. one of the things you will see is across all of our different platforms, we are always looking at different ways to evolve. we also do it carefully and an way that works for the businesses and the people who use the platforms. taylor: that was facebook cmea vice president nicola mendelsohn . sarahre, we are joined by frier who covers facebook at the very end, they talk about a conversation about ads on what's up. uni are talking about whatsapp in a different context -- context and the hiking -- and the hacking of jeff bezos's phone. this is according to the yuan what role does whatsapp play in that? what's ephesus -- is supposed to be encrypted messages. sarah: that is what makes it complicated a bell for the hacking situation and for an advert -- advertising operation. facebook cannot see what people are sending to each other on whatsapp. there is no way for them to know necessarily what is in a video. there is no way for an advertiser to know what people are sending, and therefore target them with relevant ads. facebook would have to do some triangulation between whatsapp, facebook, instagram and messenger to come up with information to target people in whatsapp. very complicated. with the hacking a particular, we are talking about something that they don't have the keys to de-encrypt. all they can say is there was a video. a default setting where videos get auto downloaded before people start looking at them. it is meant to improve the experience and get it much more quickly viewable. especially because whatsapp is used in so many places that have low connectivity. that could have made it more piece of to get a material that had some malware in it. taylor: in a few days after this incident and in your conversations with facebook, have they said anything about their changing role in how they would look at things differently from that auto download? sarah: they did speak actually in the fall to the threat with the mp4 files. they have spoken about the threat from one security group on whatsapp. with this particular hacking, they have not weighed in. nicola, in a separate part of her talk, did mention that this is akin to if you are open an email, say an email with a link that was malicious, that was going to cause a virus to be downloaded onto your computer, there thinking that -- they are thinking of whatsapp in a similar way. where it is a means of sending messages and the messages themselves, whether it is a risk to your devices up to the maker of the operating system. in this case, apple. taylor: in that conversation, she said 2020 is different from 2016 because this time we are making investments and having a thoughtful conversation about the ways in which facebook can misinformation. then you have a story out that george soros is coming out and saying facebook is conspiring to reelect trump, that they have not done anything to prevent the dissemination of misinformation. your reaction? sarah: this is a situation where facebook is treading carefully because they don't want to upset anyone on either side. to limitt want misinformation on facebook because then they would have to decide what is true and false? they would have to be the arbiters of that. zuckerberg says they don't want to. have that power -- to have that power. she was talking about the transparency they are ringing to the table. that is useful only to an extent. if people are scrolling through ads, howand looking at many of those people do you think are going to the political ad archives to try to check what those messages are compared to other candidates, who is paying for them? they are not going to. it is a passive experience when you are browsing facebook. you are susceptible to getting information that is not true. taylor: a great conversation on whatsapp, facebook. that was bloomberg technology's sarah frier. thank you for joining us. coming up, google and facebook are at odds again. this time is it -- it is about the same issue, privacy. we will have more details next. this is bloomberg. ♪ taylor: another clash between two tech giants, google and apple. google claims the nt tracking tool on apple's web browser is fault -- is flawed and creates more problems than it solves. they are the most popular browsers and this is not the first time google and apple have had a dispute over privacy. joining us to discuss is garrett giving in new york. what exactly are the google engineers saying in this report? garrett: it is interesting. google has this group of engineers that are white hat hackers. hackers for good that try to find vulnerabilities in google software and also software made by other tech companies, and worn those companies about them and eventually release the information to the public so that everyone can fix the software and make sure malicious actors don't take advantage of it. what happened here is google found what it says the problem in this tool that apple released a couple years ago. the very purpose of the tool is to block tracking for advertisers to track you when you are using safari browser. the specific way the tool works makes it possible for hackers if they wanted to, and there is no known cases of this happening yet, but if the hackers wanted to and figured this out themselves, they could track you themselves using the anti-tracking tool. taylor: what is apple saying? the first time this is brought to their attention, they thanked google, said they fixed the problem. gerrit: it has evolved into a fight between the companies. google told apple about this last year. they did it quietly, they did not release it to the public, to give ample time to deal with it. apple said they went and did that. they put out this cryptic blog post in december saying they fixed some problems, did not really detail it and thanked google in that. yesterday, when this finally was released to the public, some google engineers on twitter said that apple actually did not solve all the problems, they only papered over a few of them. apple has not directly responded to that yet. it is kind of a mystery exactly whether this is now something that is out there that hackers who maybe had not known about it before can now potentially take advantage, or if apple has really fixed all the problems. taylor: explain this to me, if the two web browsers our competitors, is google trying to help apple point out the flaws? what is the purpose of this? gerrit: my understanding of how these kind of google hackers work, is they do not necessarily get told by google executives to go out and make our competitors look bad or embarrass them by pointing out their flaws. you can say on the one hand it is embarrassing but on the other hand, useful down the road for apple to know about it. it is better to be embarrassed in the short-term by a competitor than have a hacker or a foreign nation state take advantage of this and cause you much bigger problems. the way this google team works to my understanding, is they kind of choose the problems they are most interested in. what they think is biggest and they go after it. sometimes it happens to be an internal google software that makes them -- helps them figure that out and embarrasses them. or it is a competitor. taylor: another interesting segment in all of this is not google last week decided to block cookies originally they had not. apple was seen as more of a leader when it came to the privacy issues. how does this put them as we take a look at may the race between the two when it comes to cookies and web browsers? gerrit: what is the irony of the situation. apple's safari browser was seen not just by apple but by privacy advocates as being much better for consumers who are concerned about their privacy. it active -- it asked -- it actively tries to stop people finding you in targeting you ads. google's worldview is targeted ads are good because they help keep the web open, free and accessible. they acquiesced last week to say eventually we will get rid of cookies which are the most popular way of tracking people around the web. now it looks as if this apple tool that in the very first place was supposed to stop tracking, actually could facilitate it. taylor: bloomberg's gerrit de vynck, thank you for joining us. new roles are coming soon that will put more limits on american companies to find huawei technologies. wilbur ross tells bloomberg that some companies have worked around the work -- the world to continue sending crucial electronic components to china telecommunications giant. huawei was blacklisted last year as a security threat by the trump administration. still ahead, we continue with huawei with the latest in the extradition hearing of its cfo underway now in vancouver. that report next. this is bloomberg. ♪ when you move homes, you move more than just yourself. that's why xfinity has ma