In May 2018, the smartphone of the head of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, one of the richest people on the planet, Jeff Bezos, was hacked. Then it all ended in a loud scandal, during which Bezos tried to blackmail the National Enquirer tabloid, threatening to publish private messages and intimate photos received from his phone. Then the head of Amazon had not yet divorced his wife Mackenzie, with whom he had been married for 25 years, and had not yet advertised his affair with the former TV presenter, 49-year-old Lauren Sanchez. In a word, the situation turned out to be unpleasant.
As The Guardian and Financial Times have now reported, the hack was directly related to a message that Bezos received on WhatsApp on May 1, 2018 from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, with whom he had met personally and exchanged contacts shortly before.
The media refer to a report compiled by forensic experts from FTI Consulting (the document has already been published by the Vice Motherboard). They came to the conclusion that the video message (the same video can be seen below, it looks like this is a promotional film about telecommunications in Arabic), received by the head of Amazon from the crown prince, exploited a vulnerability in the WhatsApp messenger , using a bug to download and install malware on his personal iPhone. Bezos. This malware stole a huge amount of data from the device of the head of Amazon.
The authors of the report believe that the malware used for hacking was acquired from third-party developers by a close friend and adviser to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman, Saud Al-Kahtani. Earlier, according to media reports, he repeatedly purchased hacking tools from companies such as the infamous Hacking Team.
The results of the FTI Consulting investigation, first published by The Guardian, were criticized by information security specialists, as journalists suggested that the tool used could have been created by the Israeli company NSO Group, a well-known developer of offensive hacking tools. However, the forensic report does not say that it was the NSO Group tool that was used for hacking, experts only note that the Israeli company's tools are capable of stealing data in the same way as it happened on the Bezos device. For example, researchers cite the Pegasus malware from the NSO Group and Galileo from the Hacking Team as examples.
However, the FTI Consulting report still raises many questions and skepticism among specialists. For example, the head of Elcomsoft, Vladimir Katalov, told Vice Motherboard reporters that the experts who studied the attack, it seems, "were not qualified enough."
Why would the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia even need to hack Jeff Bezos' phone? The attack is likely related to the fact that Bezos has owned The Washington Post since 2013. The fact is that it was in this publication that the famous journalist, columnist and writer from Saudi Arabia Jamal Khashoggi, a well-known and ardent critic of the US authorities, Saudi Arabia in general and Muhammad ibn Salman in particular, was actively published in this publication. Haggoshi was killed in the fall of 2018 at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. After the assassination, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia admitted responsibility for the incident with the murder of the journalist, but at the same time stated that he was not aware of what was happening.
Now, many media outlets and experts believe that Saudi Arabia has intentionally launched an entire campaign to denigrate Jeff Bezos. For example, ZDNet journalists have prepared a detailed chronology of events in recent years related to the actions of Saudi Arabia, Jeff Bezos and the murder of Khashoggi.
Note that the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington has already officially rejected speculation that the kingdom had anything to do with the hacking of the phone of owner Jeff Bezos. Diplomats called these accusations absurd.
In turn, members of the UN human rights working group have already called for the United States to immediately and thoroughly investigate the attack on Jeff Bezos' smartphone. UN experts also believe the hack was part of Saudi Arabia's coordinated campaign against Bezos, fueled by critical coverage of events in the country.
