The United Nations has called for an immediate investigation into Jeff Bezo’s phone hacking after it was reported that the Amazon billionaire was hacked after allegedly receiving a file sent from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s WhatsApp account.
According to reports, UN experts were due to release a statement suggesting there is evidence to support claims that Jeff Bezo’s phone was targeted via an infected video message from Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s personal account, according to Reuters.
The officials Agnès Callamard, special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, and David Kaye, special rapporteur for free expression — had been reviewing a report commissioned by Mr Bezos from business advisory firm FTI Consulting.
It concluded that Jeff Bezo’s phone was hacked by a file sent from a WhatsApp account belonging to the Crown Prince, Evening Standard reports.
The forensic analysis, led by cyber expert Anthony J Ferrante, suggested that within hours of a video file being sent in May 2018 “a massive and unauthorised exfiltration of data from Jeff Bezos’s phone began, continuing and escalating for months”.
Mr Bezos and the Crown Prince had exchanged numbers at a dinner in Los Angeles during a visit by Prince Mohammed to drum up US investment to Saudi Arabia, according to the report.
But their relations soured after the October 2018 murder in Istanbul of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had used a column in the Washington Post owned by Mr Bezos to criticise Prince Mohammed.
In February last year, US tabloid National Enquirer published details of an affair Mr Bezos had been conducting, including private images and texts.
At the time, his security consultant Gavin de Becker blamed the Saudi government for the hack.
The FTI report said: “It is believed that the compromise was likely facilitated by malicious tools procured by [Saud] al-Qahtani,” a former adviser to Prince Mohammed who was dismissed following Khashoggi’s murder.
“The Saudi government has denied the allegations. An official said: “Saudi Arabia does not conduct illicit activities of this nature, nor does it condone them
“We request the presentation of any supposed evidence and the disclosure of any company that examined any forensic evidence so that we can show it is demonstrably false.”
In a tweet today the Saudi’s US embassy dismissed the “absurd” claims, which were first reported by The Guardian and Financial Times, and called for an investigation “so that we can have all the facts out”.
Mr Bezos would not comment, but a lawyer for him said that he “is co-operating with the investigation”.
The report said analysis of Mr Bezos’s phone began early last year after he asked his security team to uncover how his messages had been accessed.
In March 2019, an investigator said they had found evidence that Saudi Arabia had been involved in hacking the phone.
Mr de Becker wrote on the Daily Beast website that “our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information”.