It was reported earlier this week that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and CEO and founder of Amazon, had his mobile phone forensically examined and found that it had been compromised.
According to reports from the Guardian and the Financial Times, the forensic analysis of Bezos’s phone revealed that it had sent a large amount of personal information shortly after the phone received a video file via WhatsApp from the future king of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
It’s currently unclear exactly what the video file was of, but the forensic analysis of the file is reported to conclude that it was ‘highly probable’ that it contained malware that had penetrated the billionaire’s phone. The forensic analysis is also reported to say that the WhatsApp message was received on 1st May 2018, just weeks after Bezos and the Crown Prince exchanged numbers after meeting at a dinner in Hollywood.
The Financial Times has said that the forensic analysis found ‘a massive and unauthorized exfiltration of data from Bezos’s phone began, continuing and escalating for months’. They went on to say that the analysis found that the amount of data taken from Bezos’s phone ‘was in the dozens of gigabytes, compared to the few hundred kilobytes daily average in the months before the video file was sent.’
A Saudi official spoke with the Financial Times, saying that:
‘Saudi Arabia does not conduct illicit activities of this nature, nor does it condone them. We request the presentation of any supposed evidence and the disclosure of any company that examined any forensic evidence so that we can show it is demonstrably false.’