Amazon founder Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince' in 2018: Report

According to The Guardian, a digital forensic analysis revealed that the encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman included a malicious file that infiltrated his phone.

Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’s mobile phone was hacked after receiving a message from the Saudi Arabian crown prince, The Guardian newspaper reported.

According to the British daily, a digital forensic analysis revealed that the encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman included a malicious file that infiltrated his phone.

The analysis also found that the intrusion could have been triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of of the Saudi prince.

"The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on May 1 of that year, the unsolicited file was sent," Guardian said quoting anonymous sources.

While the details of the data taken from the is unclear, the revelation of the security breach comes almost a year after Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie announced that they would be separating after 25 years of marriage. After the divorce was finalised, Bezos, in a blog post, accused National Enquirer - a US tabloid - of threatening to publish embarrassing text messages and photos unless he publicly affirmed that there was no political motivation or outside force behind the tabloid’s coverage.

The National Enquirer had earlier disclosed an extramarital affair between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, a former television anchor, in a series of reports that relied, in part, on intimate text messages sent by Bezos.

However, Gavin de Becker, a security consultant for Bezos, told The Guardian that he believed the Saudi Arabian government had accessed Bezos’s phone before the Enquirer exposed the affair.

Business Standard