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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had his phone hacked, and the primary suspect for the hacking is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
- A UN report published Wednesday concludes that Bezos' iPhone was likely hacked using a notorious tool named Pegasus, created by the NSO Group - a secretive firm from Israel that bills itself as a leader in cyberwarfare. Saudi Arabian officials have been repeatedly connected to Pegasus hacks, according to a new UN report.
- Pegasus enables hackers to remotely access everything in an infected smartphone, from text messages to location data - and it's next to impossible to know whether your phone was infected without a professional analysis.
- In the case of Bezos, hackers had access to his phone for "months," according to the UN report.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had his phone hacked for months, and gigabytes of his private data were stolen, according to a newly published UN report.
The primary suspect in the hacking: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man he was exchanging WhatsApp messages with.
The how of the hack, according to a UN report published Wednesday morning, is maybe the wildest detail: "A 2019 forensic analysis of Mr. Bezos' iPhone that assessed with 'medium to high confidence' that his phone was infiltrated on 1 May 2018 via an MP4 video file sent from a WhatsApp account utilized personally by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
According to the UN report published on Wednesday, Bezos' phone was likely hacked using a notorious tool named Pegasus, created by the NSO Group - a secretive firm from Israel that bills itself as a leader in cyberwarfare.
So, how does Pegasus work? And how did it get inside the phone of the richest man in the world?