Bezos Hack Began With Saudi Goodwill Tour, Intimate Dinner

(Bloomberg) — In the spring of 2018, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, arrived in the U.S. for a three-week cross-country tour to pitch a progressive vision for his kingdom, including an economic plan less reliant on oil, and to charm America’s elite.

He visited MIT and Harvard, talked space travel with Richard Branson and hobnobbed with celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, according to media reports. The crown prince also met with business executives, including Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos.

It was an encounter likely weighted with tension. Both Amazon’s e-commerce site as well as its most profitable business, Amazon Web Services, had been pushing to expand in the Middle East, including in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist at the Bezos-owned Washington Post, had written columns sharply critical of the crown prince including one, while Bin Salman was visiting the U.S., saying that “replacing old tactics of intolerance with new ways of repression is not the answer.” They met at a small dinner in Los Angeles on April 4. It’s not clear what the two men talked about, but it apparently went well enough that they exchanged phone numbers.

Nearly four weeks later, on May 1, Bezos received a WhatsApp message from the crown prince’s account, which arrived “unexpectedly and without explanation, meaning it was not discussed by the parties in advance of being sent,” according to a November 2019 report by FTI Consulting Inc., a business advisory firm, which was published by Vice.

The message included a 4.22 MB video. Within hours of receiving it, “a massive and unauthorized exfiltration of data from Bezos’s phone began,” according to the report.

News of the alleged hack was reported by The Guardian on Tuesday and confirmed Wednesday by two United Nations experts, who said in a statement, “The information we have received suggests 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 Saudi Embassy has denied involvement in the hack, calling the allegations “absurd.”

The details from the U.N. statement add a remarkable twist to last year’s already remarkable accusation by Bezos that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him by threatening to publish embarrassing personal photos and texts from him a month after it published an article saying he was having an extramarital affair.

Bezos’s security team launched an investigation into how the texts leaked, led by security consultant Gavin de Becker. It didn’t take long for De Becker to home in on Saudi Arabia. De Becker said the Saudi government was targeting Bezos as the owner of the Washington Post.

A few months earlier, in October 2018, Khashoggi was murdered by agents of the Saudi government and the Washington Post published “ever-expanding revelations” about the role of the Saudi government and of the crown prince personally, according to the U.N. experts. That was soon followed by an online campaign against Bezos: In November 2018, the top-trending hashtag on Saudi Twitter was “Boycott Amazon.”

On Nov. 8, 2018, Bezos received another message from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account, at the time Bezos and his wife were exploring a divorce and before his marital problems became public, according to the FTI Consulting report. It showed a picture of a woman who resembles Sanchez and read: “Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License Agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree.”

De Becker’s inquiry included interviews with current and former executives at the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., discussions with Middle East experts and cybersecurity officials who have tracked Saudi spyware. He concluded, in a March 30, 2019 column in the Daily Beast “with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private information.”

But the investigation wasn’t over. De Becker hired FTI Consulting on Feb. 24, 2019 to do an analysis of Bezos’ iPhone X, according to the company’s report. The analysis was conducted in a “well-equipped and secure lab environment, including forensic imaging of Bezos’ phone and analysis of phone behavior in a sandboxed network,” the report says.