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

Centre wants WhatsApp to explain Israeli spyware breach by November 4

It is still not clear which government entity bought the software that has reportedly impacted 1,400 devices globally.

The government has given time till November 4 to WhatsApp for explaining how the Israeli surveillance software was used to spy on some people in India and what the firm was doing to stop such occurrences.

It is still not clear which government entity bought the software that has reportedly impacted 1,400 devices globally. WhatsApp has said it was filing a complaint in the US against Israeli technology firm NSO Group for the cyberattack that exploited vulnerability in the app's video calling feature.

“Government of India is concerned at the breach of privacy of citizens of India on the messaging platform WhatsApp. We have asked WhatsApp to explain the kind of breach and what it is doing to safeguard the privacy of millions of Indian citizens,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, tweeted.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said the attempts to align the government for a reported breach were “misleading”. “It is clarified that the government operates strictly as per provisions of the law. There are adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent citizen is harassed or his privacy breached,” it said. However, it did not address the question of whether the central or state governments or any of their agencies have ever bought NSO Group’s spyware technology or its well-known product Pegasus.

In the vulnerability, a WhatsApp user could receive what appears to be a video call and even if the call is unanswered, the attacker could transmit malicious code to infect the victim’s phone with spyware. Another NSO Group software, Pegasus, was used to install spying software on devices between August 2016 and August 2018 by Toronto-based Citizen Lab.

The NSO Group claims to sell surveillance technology to governments globally only for the purposes of fighting terrorism and crime but has been accused of selling to governments that have a track record of spying on its citizens.

Business Standard