Agnes Callamard and David Kaye– both unique rapporteurs designated by the UN– called for an investigation, and said the forensic report showed that a number belonging to Crown Prince Mohammed had actually hacked Bezos’ phone through a malicious video file sent by means of WhatsApp.
The investigators do not explicitly state who was behind the forensic investigation, but reporting from The Guardian and The New York Times suggests the details has actually come from advisory company FTI Consulting.
Here are some of the most unusual information and twists:
1. Jeff Bezos gave his personal contact number to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after going to a small supper together in Los Angeles in April 2018.
The actual dinner took place the next month.
2. A month later, Crown Prince Mohammed allegedly sent out a strange, infected video file that jeopardized Bezos’ phone.
The thumbnail for the video shows the flags of Saudi Arabia and Sweden.
3. The report does not detail the specific flaw exploited to hack Bezos’ phone, which is an ongoing mystery.
The UN technical summary does not explain about the vulnerability or vulnerabilities made use of to hack Bezos’ phone.
Cybersecurity professionals have actually indicated an understood, earlier vulnerability relating to WhatsApp and MP4 video files.
Others state it isn’t clear that there was any WhatsApp vulnerability at all, when Bezos was targeted by a file containing destructive code. It’s likewise possible the attack exploited a flaw in the underlying mobile operating system.
” This is not indicative of a vulnerability in WhatsApp,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Structure, told Recode “There is nothing they can do when a trusted contact sends you a carefully crafted malicious link.”
WhatsApp has not commented publicly on the reports.
4. Crown Prince Mohammed continued to message through 2018 and 2019, presumably sending Bezos tips about his individual life.
Mentioning FTI Consulting’s forensic analysis, Crown Prince Mohammed continued to message Jeff Bezos and supposedly dropped hints that he understood information of the Amazon CEO’s personal life that had not originated from public sources.
6. In the meantime, the malware on Bezos’ phone took a lot information that the quantity of info leaving the phone escalated more than one million percent.
The hack carried on for months, and at its height the data spiked by 106,032,045%, siphoning off a tremendous 4.6 gigabytes.
7. The hack was most likely straight linked to the terrible saga and murder of Washington Post reporter and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi was a dissident, and a writer for The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos.
” The scenarios and timing of the hacking and security of Bezos likewise strengthen support for more investigation by United States and other relevant authorities of the accusations that the Crown Prince purchased, prompted, or, at a minimum, was aware of preparing for but stopped working to stop the mission that fatally targeted Mr. Khashoggi in Istanbul,” the private investigators concluded.
8. The hack may have been committed utilizing Israeli software which has been utilized to target Saudi dissidents, foreign journalists, and activists.
” The forensic analysis examined that the intrusion most likely was undertaken through the use of a prominent spyware product determined in other Saudi monitoring cases, such as the NSO Group’s Pegasus-3 malware, an item commonly reported to have actually been purchased and released by Saudi authorities,” the private investigators said.
NSO Group has strenuously rejected any involvement in the Bezos hack.
In their timeline the UN investigators pointed to many Saudi dissidents and human rights activists, some of whom were in contact with Khashoggi and were hacked through malware sent out through WhatsApp texts and links.
9. Saudi Arabia presumably released a stop-start Twitter campaign versus Bezos.
In their report, the detectives accused Saudi Arabia of “clandestinely waging a massive online project against Mr. Bezos and Amazon targeting him principally as the owner of The Washington Post.”
Their timeline reveals 2 flurries of anti-Bezos activity on Saudi Twitter.
The very first came in October 2018, less than a month after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. They note that the campaign stopped “quickly” in April 2019, “highly showing inauthentic and coordinated hashtags and tweets.”
The Twitter project against Bezos reignited in October 2019 after Bezos went to a memorial for Khashoggi.
10 Now the UN wants an extensive examination into Khashoggi’s murder, the hack on Bezos, and the role Saudi Arabia allegedly played in all of this.
The UN investigators concluded that the hacking of Bezos’ and others’ devices “needs instant investigation by United States and other pertinent authorities.” That investigation needs to include Crown Prince Mohammed, they included.
The UN rapporteurs are still pursuing an examination into the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
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