Jeff Bezos' phone hacking: in direct line with Mohammed ben Salmane?

MBS in troubled IT waters. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is accused of being personally involved in the phone hacking of Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and Washington Post boss, according to revelations published by several Western media on Tuesday, January 21 .

A message sent to Jeff Bezos from the personal WhatsApp account of Mohammed bin Salman, in early May 2018, contained "with a medium to high degree of certainty" a virus, according to research by a team of experts hired by the boss from Amazon, reports the Financial Times. A report presented to the United Nations on Wednesday January 22 comes to the same conclusion. UN experts have called for an investigation. Riyadh called the new charges "absurd".

Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos' phone are absurd. We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.

With the help of Israeli spy software

The malicious software discovered would have allowed the entourage of the crown prince to access the data of the smartphone of the American billionaire and to siphon information from it, tells the British daily newspaper The Guardian, which was the first to reveal this affair.

The Saudis allegedly used the Pegasus spyware to infiltrate the phone. This computer weapon, developed by the Israeli computer security company NSO, is considered to be the ultimate in this area. "We have never seen such sophisticated spyware. Its existence on the infected smartphone cannot be detected by the user. Furthermore, no data encryption is effective to protect itself from it", explained to France 24, in 2016, Gert-Jan Schenk, vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa of Lookout, the American mobile computer security company that first scanned this virus. This ability to ignore encryption of communications makes it the perfect tool for hacking secure email accounts like WhatsApp.

Mohammed ben Salmane recovered Jeff Bezos' cell phone number during the highly publicized visit that the crown prince made to the United States in March 2018 to meet several prominent business leaders. During the tour, the two men discussed the possibility of Amazon installing data centers in the Wahhabi kingdom. Several messages exchanged on WhatsApp and that the Financial Times could consult show that discussions around the opportunities for Jeff Bezos to invest in Saudi Arabia continued for several months.

The new revelations suggest that the crown prince didn't have his economic interests in mind when he asked for the cell phone number of the richest man in the world. They could prove explosive in the case of the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, the Guardian believes. MBS and his entourage were accused of having ordered this assassination, which Riyadh has always fiercely denied.

From Jamal Khashoggi to the mistress of Jeff Bezos

The hacking seems to indicate that the regime had access to the phone of the boss of the newspaper who published, since June 2017, the critical articles of Jamal Khashoggi. Mohammed ben Salmane "probably thought he could get a change in tone from the Washington Post if he had access to compromising information about Jeff Bezos," said Andrew Miller, an American expert on the Middle East and former national security adviser. of former US President Barack Obama, interviewed by The Guardian.

But this new scandal also reinforces the thesis that the Saudi government was involved in the vendetta led by the pro-Trump camp against Jeff Bezos against the background of olé olé photos last year. In January 2019, the very conservative and tabloid tout The National Inquirer revealed the underside of an extramarital affair maintained by Jeff Bezos, leading to the divorce of the billionaire. Over twenty articles on this subject, the newspaper owned by David Pecker, a relative of Donald Trump, revealed the escapades of the businessman, largely based on messages exchanged between the two lovers. The climax of this story, on February 9, Jeff Bezos denounced an attempt at blackmail undertaken by officials of the National Enquirer, who threatened to publish intimate photos of the couple if the Washington Post did not stop its investigation into the links between Saudi power and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Jeff Bezos had promised to mobilize his tremendous resources to understand how the tabloid came into possession of the compromising photos and messages. At the time, the Saudi track had already been mentioned. But the idea that the virus behind all of this could come from Mohammed ben Salmane's personal WhatsApp account had not come to anyone's attention. Whether the princely hacking is real or not, it is, in any case, unlikely that Amazon will continue with its plans to establish new data centers in Saudi Arabia.

The France 24 week summary invites you to come back to the news that marked the week

Download the app