A report from the United Nations suggests that Amazon CEO and Washinton Post owner Jeff Bezos was the victim of a hack orchestrated by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
The UN report says that information “suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr. Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia. ”
It went on to say that “This reported surveillance of Mr. Bezos, allegedly through software developed and marketed by a private company and transferred to a government without judicial control of its use, is, if true, a concrete example of the harms that result from the unconstrained marketing, sale and use of spyware.”
It specifically named the NSO Group’s Pegasus-3 malware, “a product widely reported to have been purchased and deployed by Saudi officials.”
The report saic that Bezos phone “was infiltrated on 1 May 2018 via an MP4 video file sent from a WhatsApp account utilized personally by Mohammed bin Salman.” Bezos and MBS reportedly had exchanged phone numbers the month before.