Read the report that concluded Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone
This week, The Guardian posted a huge story reporting that Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone in May 2018 after he received a message from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A report published by the security forensics firm FTI Consulting concluded with “medium to high confidence” that was the case.
If you want to read the report yourself, you can do so right here, thanks to Vice, which obtained the report in its entirety exclusively on Wednesday.
Some security professionals don’t think that FTI went far enough with its analysis, as reported by CyberScoop. Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos, for example, said that there was “no smoking gun” in the report. Some researchers said that FTI should have been able to analyze the encrypted file that the crown prince sent Bezos which reportedly hacked his phone. And one said he didn’t see evidence in the report to suggest that Bezos’ phone was hacked.
Today, the White House also commented for the first time on the situation:
The White House comments for the first time on the U.N. report tying the Saudi crown prince to the hack of Bezos’s phone. “Saudi Arabia is obviously an important ally,” Hogan Gidley says. “I don’t have any more information than that. Obviously we take this situation seriously.”
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 23, 2020
Right now, this is a story with a lot of twists and turns, but I highly recommend reading my colleague Casey Newton’s analysis of the situation, where he gives the salient advice to never open a WhatsApp message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
This week, The Guardian posted a huge story reporting that Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone in May 2018 after he received a message from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A report published by the security forensics firm FTI Consulting concluded with “medium to high confidence” that was…
