- On Tuesday, The Guardian reported that an international investigation had concluded that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ phone was most likely hacked by a link in a May 2018 WhatsApp message from Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
- Cybersecurity experts hired by Bezos to investigate how details of his affair were leaked to the media also reported similar findings, the Financial Times reported.
- The hacking fills in a missing chunk in a timeline linking the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote for the Bezos-owned Washington Post, and Bezos, who announced last January that he was getting divorced.
- But many issues still remain unresolved.
The Guardian published a bombshell report Tuesday describing evidence that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
According to the report, a WhatsApp message that Bezos received from the crown prince’s phone number in May 2018 is believed to have included a “malicious file” that compromised the Amazon CEO’s phone. Bezos and the crown prince had previously exchanged a few friendly messages on WhatsApp, according to the report. But within hours of receiving the video file in May, Bezos’ phone began to surreptitiously transmit large amounts of data.
Bezos also owns The Washington Post, however, which reported aggressively on the killing of the Post columnist and high-profile Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents later in 2018. The killing is thought to have been ordered by the crown prince.
Last January, Bezos’ affair with the TV anchor Lauren Sanchez was reported by the National Enquirer, and intimate selfies and text messages that Bezos had sent Sanchez were leaked.
The Saudi Embassy in the US called the allegations of hacking “absurd” in a tweet Tuesday.
The report of the hacking would seem to fill in a lot of the missing pieces to this puzzle of intrigue and deception. But there are still a lot of things we don’t know. Here are some of the top unanswered questions:
What data from Bezos’ phone was accessed in the hack?
The nature of the data taken from Bezos’ phone remains unknown to the UN investigators looking into the hacking, according to The Guardian’s report. A subsequent report from the Financial Times citing sources from Bezos’ own investigation into the matter suggests the breach was substantial, allowing hackers to access “dozens of gigabytes.”
Is Saudi Arabia behind the leaks of Bezos’ intimate selfies?
Whether the Amazon CEO’s private photos and texts were leaked to the National Enquirer from the Saudi government has yet to be determined by international investigators, The Guardian reported.
But there have been speculations that a foreign government was involved in the leaks.
Bezos published a Medium post last February accusing the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., and its CEO, David Pecker, of “extortion and blackmail.” Bezos also hinted at ties between the media organization and the Saudi government. And Bezos’ security consultant Gavin de Becker wrote a personal account in The Daily Beast concluding that the Saudi government had hacked Bezos’ phone and gained access to his private information well before the Enquirer story was released.
What was in the video file the crown prince sent Bezos?
The video most likely contained some sort of malware, but we don’t know for sure. The Guardian reported that a digital forensics analysis found it “highly probable” that Bezos’ phone was breached after he clicked on an “infected” video file sent to him from Crown Prince Mohammed’s WhatsApp account. We don’t know, however, what exactly the file was infected with and therefore what type of information it might have been capable of accessing.
Did the crown prince himself send the compromising text?
While The Guardian’s report said the video was sent from Crown Prince Mohammed’s personal WhatsApp account, that doesn’t prove the crown prince himself sent the video. He could have authorized someone else to send the video on his behalf. Alternatively, an unauthorized third party could have surreptitiously accessed his account and sent the malware, though there are no indications so far suggesting that someone successfully hacked the crown prince to hack Bezos’ phone.
Was the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group responsible?
The Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group has a history of selling software that hacks phones using WhatsApp. Crucially, the company has been linked to the assassination of Khashoggi.
A lawsuit filed by the Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz accused NSO back in December 2018 of helping Saudi Arabia’s government spy on his communications with Khashoggi. NSO denied any allegations that its software helped lead to Khashoggi’s death, the Associated Press reported.
Almost a year later, WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook, sued the Israeli company. It alleged in October that NSO Group had exploited vulnerabilities in WhatsApp’s video-calling system to send malware to the devices of more than 1,400 users to allow governments and intelligence organizations to spy on them.
Who else has accused the crown prince of hacking?
Bezos and Crown Prince Mohammed exchanged numbers during the crown prince’s visit to the US in April 2018, apparently during a trip in which the Saudi ruler met with several prominent tech executives and investors, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (who was running Google at the time), and the investor Peter Thiel.
While there is no evidence of other hacking attempts carried out against these tech executives, there are several reports of hacking attempts carried out against Saudi dissenters at about the same time Bezos’ phone reportedly began transmitting data, the Financial Times reported.
As reported by Business Insider