Saudi Prince MBS Hacked Jeff Bezo's Phone

Perknose

Forum Director & Omnipotent Overlord
Forum Director
Oct 9, 1999
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UN experts are demanding an immediate investigation by the US and others into evidence indicating Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, was hacked with spyware deployed in a WhatsApp message sent from the account of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The special rapporteurs – Agnès Callamard and David Kaye – said in a joint statement they were “gravely concerned” by information they had reviewed about 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”.

The statement comes after the Guardian reported on Tuesday that Bezos, who is chief executive of Amazon and the world’s richest man, appeared to have had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message apparently sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that President Fat Boy's Bestest Mideast Buddy would do such a thing. /s

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allisolm

Elite Member
Administrator
Jan 2, 2001
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Ah, but it's all okay - the Saudis deny it and everyone knows how trustworthy their assertions are.

"The Saudi embassy in Washington said in a statement posted online that 'recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos' phone are absurd.'

 

woolfe9998

Lifer
Apr 8, 2013
16,188
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Bezos said as much a year ago when the Inquirer broke the story about his affair. The interesting question is why MBS did it. Was it because Khashoggi's column criticizing MBS appeared in the Post, or did he do it to help Trump? Or both. Trump working with foreign leaders to scandalize his domestic opponents and critics is hardly anything new.
 
Dec 10, 2005
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If I remember reading another story correctly, Mr. Jared Kushner was also using Whatsapp to chat with MBS. His phone has most certainly been compromised through the same means. Good thing Trump forced through his security clearance...
 

HomerJS

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
35,956
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MBS doing Trump's dirty work, buying his properties and assassinating US residents.

So, no worries??
 

UNCjigga

Lifer
Dec 12, 2000
24,800
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More coverage from WaPo, along with how exactly Bezos’ phone is believed to have been compromised:




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 [UN] 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 report says that “within hours of receipt of the MP4 video file from the Crown Prince’s account, massive and (for Bezos’ phone) unprecedented exfiltration of data from the phone began.” The flow of data out of Bezos’s phone jumped suddenly by 29,156 percent and the “spiking then continued undetected over some months,” according to the investigation.
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.
...
In November, Mohammed’s account texted a photograph to Bezos, accompanied by what the report called “a sardonic caption.” The picture showed a woman who looked like Lauren Sanchez, the former TV host who, as the National Enquirer would report in January 2019, was conducting an extramarital affair with Bezos.

Last year, Bezos alleged through his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, that the Saudi government had “access to Bezos’s phone, and gained private information.”


Link to U.N. remarks (underlying FTI forensics report not yet publicly available): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6668237-SRsSumexFreedexAnnexes.html
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,509
29,090
146
Ah, but it's all okay - the Saudis deny it and everyone knows how trustworthy their assertions are.

"The Saudi embassy in Washington said in a statement posted online that 'recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos' phone are absurd.'


I'm sure Trump will slither along any moment to publicly announce his faith and belief in the honesty of MBS and complete assurance that MBS is completely innocent of all accusations. (Kushner family still has major debts, right?)
 

IronWing

No Lifer
Jul 20, 2001
68,847
26,623
136
If not for MBS' murder of Khashoggi, a trillionaire hacking a billionaire's phone would get a yawn. As it is, one more lead to follow back to MBS.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,509
29,090
146
Bezos said as much a year ago when the Inquirer broke the story about his affair. The interesting question is why MBS did it. Was it because Khashoggi's column criticizing MBS appeared in the Post, or did he do it to help Trump? Or both. Trump working with foreign leaders to scandalize his domestic opponents and critics is hardly anything new.

I'm guessing he was going after Kashoggi, but turning up info damaging to Bezos personally, which means of great value to the chief snowflake of the US and his infinite in-capacity for self assurance, MBS realized he also had an object of great value, with which to exchange for favors for our historically corruptible, profoundly blackmailed president.
 
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Feb 4, 2009
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It’s such a weird Dr. Evil type plan.

Weird how they didn’t do the first step to find out Bezos was in a open marriage
 

woolfe9998

Lifer
Apr 8, 2013
16,188
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I'm guessing he was going after Kashoggi, but turning up info damaging to Bezos personally, which means of great value to the chief snowflake of the US and his infinite in-capacity for self assurance, MBS realized he also had an object of great value, with which to exchange for favors for our historically corruptible, profoundly blackmailed president.

That's a perfectly reasonable assessment and may well be exactly the case. However, I wouldn't discount Trump being in on this or at least having advanced knowledge of it.

Trump's calls to MBS are on that same codeword server that his call with Zelenksy is, as well as his calls to Putin. Who knows what they have actually discussed. At this point there is literally nothing I would put past Trump.
 

HomerJS

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
35,956
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Did hack happen after Khashoggi murder? If so sounds like a payoff not to follow up on murder.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,509
29,090
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That's a perfectly reasonable assessment and may well be exactly the case. However, I wouldn't discount Trump being in on this or at least having advanced knowledge of it.

Trump's calls to MBS are on that same codeword server that his call with Zelenksy is, as well as his calls to Putin. Who knows what they have actually discussed. At this point there is literally nothing I would put past Trump.

Yes, and the last part is very revealing. This is already public information. AFAIK, none of that information can be erased. It is owned by the federal gov't, not the Trump empire, and so when those fucking criminals are out of there, imagine what will (should) be revealed about not only Trump's unbridled treachery, but the powers that continue to allow it to happen (Barr, Turtle, and...gay lizard? I don't know what to call Graham, but something like that)
 

Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
Nov 11, 1999
62,365
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The way this kind of thing works & propagates, MBS may have been a victim himself. Which is not to defend him at all.
 

kage69

Lifer
Jul 17, 2003
26,967
35,580
136
Yep, too bad about those Sa'udi IT workers that went rogue. Someone's going to get a date with a freshly honed saber.
 

UNCjigga

Lifer
Dec 12, 2000
24,800
9,002
136
The way this kind of thing works & propagates, MBS may have been a victim himself. Which is not to defend him at all.

Except the report states the malicious code was embedded in a Saudi propaganda video MBS shared, and that months later he sent Bezos a photo of his secret mistress with a “sardonic caption” (implying he knew Bezos had a mistress and he had access to info from the phone hack.)
 

Ichinisan

Lifer
Oct 9, 2002
28,298
1,234
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The way this kind of thing works & propagates, MBS may have been a victim himself. Which is not to defend him at all.
This was not an indiscriminate self replicating virus (which would waste a valuable zero-day exploit).

It was a targeted hack.