The Guardian writes that malicious code was hidden in a video Mohammed bin Salman sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
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The cellphone from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was hacked in mid-2018. A year later, Bezos publicly resisted an attempt by the National Enquirer. The tabloid claimed to have intimate photos of Bezos and his affair at the time and today’s partner, Lauren Sanchez. Bezos did not give in, but made the process public.
So far, however, it was unknown who could have hacked the phone of the richest man in the world. The Guardian reports now that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was personally the one who sent the message that Bezos’ phone was “highly likely” to be compromised.
Malicious code in Whatsapp video
The newspaper refers to witnesses who are familiar with the investigation of Bezos’ phone, but without giving their names. According to this, a Whatsapp account, which is associated with the Saudi Crown Prince, sent two messages to Bezos. One was harmless, but the second was a video file that contained code that eventually hacked the phone. After that, large amounts of data flowed from Bezos’ phone within hours.
Bezos’ chief of security had already checked the news website after his own investigation Daily Beast wrote that there is clear evidence of the Saudis getting involved in the hack. The National Enquirer had always rejected this and claimed that the brother of Bezos’ lover had sold them the photos and text messages.
from Guardian Asked for an opinion, Bezos merely replied that he was cooperating with ongoing investigations by the authorities. The Saudi embassy tweeted the report as “absurd” and called for an investigation to “clarify all the facts.”
If the information in the newspaper is correct, it indicates at least a demanding attack. As a rule, there are only a few private companies or states that are capable of such actions. Because the challenge is to slip the malware onto a target person’s devices unnoticed. This usually requires previously unknown security gaps in apps or operating systems, which are then exploited.
Basically, it has been known for a long time that phones could now be secretly and infiltrated via Whatsapp. The Israeli IT company NSO Group caused a sensation: it had probably bought up information about a Whatsapp security vulnerability on the black market in order to use it for espionage. With a covert voice call, it should have been possible to play malware on smartphones unnoticed. Whatsapp therefore took legal action against the company.
The Israeli government had allowed NSOs to do business with various Arab countries. The government has to issue export licenses because it classifies the software as a weapon. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that there were $ 55 million in spy software contracts between NSO and Saudi Arabia. At that time, NSO denied having entered into such transactions.
However, Saudi dissidents and the human rights organization Amnesty International criticized the company violently. Her accusation: The company had helped Saudi Arabia with its software to spy on critics. Activist Omar Abdulaziz specifically accused the NSO Group of using software to help the Saudi royal family collect information about Jamal Khashoggi. The journalist was one of the regime’s most prominent critics and was killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in October 2018. Khashoggi had been a columnist for the Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
