Saudi Arabia involved in Jeff Bezos phone hack, UN report will say
Two UN officials will report on Wednesday that there is enough evidence suggesting that Saudi Arabia had hacked Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos’s phone and both the kingdom and the United States should investigate, a person familiar with the matter said.
The United Nations officials plan a public statement asserting that they found credible a forensic report commissioned by Bezos’s security team which concluded that his phone probably had been hacked with a tainted video sent from a WhatsApp account belonging to Saudi’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The report by FTI Consulting concluded that massive amounts of data began leaving Bezos’s phone about a month after the video was shared in mid-2018, the person said, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject.
Outside experts consulted by the UN agreed that while the case was not airtight, the evidence was strong enough to warrant a fuller investigation.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud dismissed the charges.
«I think ‘absurd’ is exactly the right word,» he told Reuters in an interview in Davos. «The idea that the crown prince would hack Jeff Bezos’s phone is absolutely silly.»
The alleged cyberattack is said to have taken place months before the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the Saudi government and a columnist for the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
Prince Mohammed, or MBS as he is familiarly known, said last year that the killing was carried out by rogue operatives and that he did not order it.
The Guardian newspaper first reported the crown prince’s alleged involvement. It said the encrypted message from the number used by the crown prince is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone Bezos had used and extracted large amounts of data.
The UN statement will come from Agnes Callamard, special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, and David Kaye, special rapporteur for free expression.
They are building toward a fuller report they expect to give to the UN in June, the person said. They said in Twitter posts that they will be releasing a statement on Wednesday addressing the Guardian report.
Amazon declined to comment.
The relationship between the Amazon chief executive and the Saudi government had soured since early last year after he alluded to Saudi Arabia’s displeasure at the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of Khashoggi.
In another previous flashpoint, Bezos’s security chief said last year that the Saudi government had gained access to the Amazon CEO’s phone and leaked messages to U.S. tabloid the National Enquirer between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor who the newspaper said he was dating.
A month before, Bezos had accused the newspaper’s owner of trying to blackmail him with the threat of publishing «intimate photos» he allegedly sent to Sanchez.
The Saudi government has denied having anything to do with the National Enquirer reporting.
