Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s phone was hacked with a WhatsApp message (A malicious video file) that had been sent from the personal account of Saudi Arabia crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
According to the Guardian report, a malicious video file was sent from the Saudi prince Whatsapp account to Bezos’ iPhone, after that Bezos’ phone got compromised and the data exfiltrated.
The incident took place on 1 May 2018, within hours of compromise large amount of data was exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours.
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According to the UNN report, the attack took advantage of a WhatsApp vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-3568 to install Pegasus malware.
The Pegasus malware was first spotted in the year 2016, it is one of the most sophisticated and powerful spyware that can perform various malicious activities in both iOS and Android devices.
If the phone infected with Pegasus then it gives complete access to the attacker remotely, then can access everything includes passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, live voice calls from popular mobile messaging apps and others.
The forensic analysis founds that “unprecedented exfiltration of data from the phone began, increasing data egress suddenly by 29,156 percent to 126 MB. Data spiking then continued undetected over some months and at rates as much as 106,032,045 percent (4.6 GB) higher than the pre-video data egress baseline for Mr. Bezos’ phone of 430KB.”
It is unclear what sort of the data exfiltrated, within hours of receiving the MP4 video file from the Saudi Princess the exfiltration of data begins on Bezos’ phone.
“Based on the forensic analysis, following to the hacking of Mr. Bezos’ phone, the Crown Prince sent WhatsApp messages to Mr. Bezos, in November 2018 and February 2019, in which he allegedly revealed private and confidential information about Mr. Bezos’ personal life that was not available from public sources.”
“The two experts – who were appointed by the Human Rights Council – recently became aware of 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. “
The Saudi Embassy in the united states said that “Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind the hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’s phone are absurd,” and they are to call for an investigation.
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