Jeff Bezos phone hacking incident

In January 2020, the FTI Consulting company claimed that in May 2018 with "medium to high confidence" the phone of Jeff Bezos had been hacked by a file sent from the WhatsApp account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.

[4] In December 2021, the FBI stated they could not find proof to substantiate claims that Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos's phone, and has considered an investigation into those allegations a low priority.

[5] Starting in September 2017, The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, published a series of columns by Jamal Khashoggi that were critical of Saudi Arabia or bin Salman.

[4] In February 2019, Bezos wrote a post on Medium, accusing The National Enquirer and its parent company American Media, Inc. (AMI) of extortion and blackmail of him with images of his affair.

[11] de Becker also reported he had presented details of his investigation to law enforcement officials; furthermore, he said there was a "close relationship" between bin Salman and American Media CEO David Pecker.

[16] The report stated that just "hours" after Bezos received the file from bin Salman, his phone began transmitting dramatically higher amounts of data, and that this continued for months.

[17] They noted other phones that were hacked from May 2018 to June 2018, belonging to two Khashoggi associates (Yahya Assiri and Omar Abdulaziz), an Amnesty International official, and Saudi dissident Ghanem al-Dosari.

[3] One such expert was Andrew Miller, who served on the national security council under President Obama, who claimed that Bezos' targeting by the crown prince reflects the personality-centric nature of Saudi politics.

[3] The Washington Post in January 2020 quoted security researchers as saying that "Bezos probably fell victim to the iPhone's Achilles' heel: Its defences are so difficult to penetrate that once sophisticated attackers are in, they can go largely undetected."

[27] United Nations special rapporteurs Agnès Callamard and David Kaye stated in January 2020 that the alleged hacking suggests that there was "an effort to influence, if not silence, the Washington Post's reporting on Saudi Arabia", with bin Salman possibly part of the operation.

[28] MIT Technology Review offered the opinion in January 2020 that FTI Consulting's report "lacks conclusive evidence", noting that it failed to decisively identify the specific spyware used against Bezos.