Report: Saudi Prince Allegedly Hacked Jeff Bezos' Phone

United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that an account belonging to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent an infected video to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, triggering a massive extraction of data from the billionaire’s cell phone, The Washington Post reports.

The report by human rights investigators Agnes Callamard and David Kaye says the forensic evidence found in Bezos’s phone “suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia.”

Prince Mohammed bin Salman

In a report released Wednesday, Callamard and Kaye called for the United States and other nations to investigate the alleged hacking of Bezos’s phone as part of a larger look at what they called “the continuous, multi-year, direct and personal involvement of the Crown Prince in efforts to target perceived opponents.”

The U.N. officials’ report was based on a forensic investigation of Bezos’s phone commissioned by the Amazon founder, who also owns The Washington Post. Callamard and Kaye said the crown prince’s involvement in the alleged hack was part of “a pattern of targeted surveillance of perceived opponents” by Saudi authorities and was “relevant to...ongoing evaluation of claims about the Crown Prince’s involvement in the 2018 murder of Saudi and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

The 2018 hack of Bezos’s phone took place five months before Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who was under contract with The Post’s editorial department to write opinion columns, was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Five Saudi nationals were sentenced to death last month in connection with the Khashoggi killing after a secret trial in Saudi Arabia.

According to the report, Bezos and Mohammed exchanged phone numbers at a dinner in Los Angeles about a month before the hack. The dinner took place the day after The Post published a column by Khashoggi that blasted the prince’s regime, saying that “replacing old tactics of intolerance with new ways of repression is not the answer.”

Four weeks later, on May 1, 2018, the prince sent the billionaire entrepreneur a WhatsApp message containing a video that, according to a person familiar with the investigation, was a promotional piece about economic success in Saudi Arabia. Inside the video file, the forensic report concludes, was malicious code that allowed the sender to extract information from the phone.

The infecting technology did not require Bezos to click on the video, but rather instantly created a channel for remote extraction of data from the phone, according to the person familiar with the investigation.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, called the report “absurd.”