Jeff Bezos’s phone hacked ‘after message from Saudi crown prince’
‘Certain powerful people who experience Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy’
JEFF BEZOS’S mobile phone was hacked with a Whatsapp message sent from a number belonging to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, it was claimed last night.
The Amazon boss and the world’s richest man had intimate photographs and messages stolen in 2018 after an infected video file was sent to his phone, according to The Guardian.
An analysis of his device reportedly found that the hack occurred during a seemingly innocuous Whatsapp conversation with Saudi heir Mohammed bin Salman.
The alleged exchange took place in May, several months before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident who frequently criticised Saudi Arabia in The Washington Post, the US newspaper owned by Mr Bezos.
Private messages revealing that Mr Bezos, who is worth around £90billion, was having an affair with media personality Lauren Sánchez (now his partner) were first published in early 2019 by the
National Enquirer. The billionaire later alleged that the US tabloid’s parent company, AMI, had attempted to use intimate photos to blackmail Mr Bezos, who is now divorced, into dropping an investigation into how the text messages had been obtained.
He intimated at close links between the Enquirer and Saudi Arabia, and indicated that his ownership of The Post could have been a factor, writing: “It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.” Gavin de Becker, the private investigator hired by Mr Bezos, later claimed that the Saudis had hacked his phone, although he did not name the crown prince or elaborate on how it was hacked. UN investigators probing Mr Khashoggi’s death in a Saudi embassy in Istanbul, five months after the alleged hack, have reportedly reviewed the forensic analysis of the phone.
After the video file was sent, large quantities of data were able to be stolen from the phone.
Last November, Whatsapp said it fixed a security flaw that involved sending a video file through the app and which allowed an attacker to run code on a target’s device. There is no evidence that this was the particular vulnerability allegedly used in the hacking and the messaging app has said the flaw was discovered inside Whatsapp, rather than reported to it.
The claims raise new questions about the crown prince’s activities in the run-up to the murder. The crown prince has always denied personal involvement in the dissident’s murder, for which five people were sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia last year. Whatsapp did not comment, while the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. The country’s government has previously denied hacking the phone.