By Jared Malsin, Dustin Volz and Justin Scheck
A global hunt for the source of embarrassing information made
public about Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos points to two actors on
separate continents.
On Wednesday, two United Nations officials said that Mr. Bezos,
the owner of the Washington Post, was likely hacked using a
WhatsApp account associated with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman in an attempt to influence news coverage of the kingdom.
A separate investigation by federal prosecutors in New York is
examining whether the brother of Jeff Bezos' girlfriend, Lauren
Sanchez, was the source for a National Enquirer story last year
about the Amazon.com Inc. founder's affair, and whether Lauren
Sanchez provided him with that information, according to people
familiar with the matter. Ms. Sanchez didn't respond to repeated
attempts to reach her for comment.
At issue is a scandal that exploded into public view last
February, when Mr. Bezos wrote a stunning blog on an
online-publishing platform. In it, Mr. Bezos accused the publisher
of the National Enquirer of trying to blackmail him by threatening
to release racy photos after the tabloid alleged he had engaged in
an extramarital affair.
Mr. Bezos suggested in the post that the photos of him may have
been obtained through illicit means that involved connections
between the National Enquirer's publisher, American Media Inc., and
the Saudi government.
The release by the U.N. of details from a forensic analysis --
commissioned by Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com -- of the
alleged hack of his phone threatened to renew tensions between the
U.S. and Saudi Arabia over the brutal killing of Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials in October 2018.
"The circumstances and timing of the hacking and surveillance of
Bezos also strengthen support for further investigation by U.S. and
other relevant authorities of the allegations that the Crown Prince
ordered, incited, or, at a minimum, was aware of planning for but
failed to stop the mission that fatally targeted Mr. Khashoggi in
Istanbul," the officials said in a statement based on their review
of the forensic analysis.
Agnes Callamard, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial
killings, and David Kaye, its special rapporteur on freedom of
expression, said the hacking took place in May 2018 and continued
for months, citing the forensic analysis they reviewed.
"At a time when Saudi Arabia was supposedly investigating the
killing of Mr. Khashoggi, and prosecuting those it deemed
responsible, it was clandestinely waging a massive online campaign
against Mr. Bezos and Amazon targeting him principally as the owner
of The Washington Post," Ms. Callamard and Mr. Kaye said.
Saudi officials rejected the allegation. "The idea that the
crown prince would hack Jeff Bezos' phone is absolutely silly,"
said Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan in a video posted on
Twitter by his ministry on Wednesday.
Saudi government spokesmen didn't respond to a request for
comment. Saudi officials close to the crown prince said they were
aware of a plan to hack Mr. Bezos' phone, but not of any attempt to
blackmail him.
These officials said the crown prince's media adviser, Saud
al-Qahtani, was involved in the hacking effort as part of a broader
intimidation campaign against Mr. Khashoggi, who was publishing
opinion pieces in the Washington Post. It wasn't immediately clear
how they were aware of plans to hack the phone of the Amazon
founder.
Mr. Qahtani didn't respond to a message seeking comment on the
matter.
Asked about the U.N.'s call to investigate, a Trump
administration official said the government was aware of the
reports and concerned about the allegations.
A lawyer for Mr. Bezos, William Isaacson, declined to comment
except to say Mr. Bezos was cooperating with investigations. On
Twitter, Mr. Bezos shared a photo of himself at a memorial for Mr.
Khashoggi with a one-word caption: #Jamal.
Mr. Khashoggi, a Post columnist, was killed in the Saudi
Consulate in Istanbul, an act the Central Intelligence Agency
concluded was likely ordered by Prince Mohammed. The Saudi
government has contested the findings.
A month after Mr. Bezos' blog post last year, Gavin de Becker, a
security consultant he hired, publicly alleged in the Daily Beast
that investigators had determined "with high confidence that the
Saudis had access to Bezos' phone, and gained private information."
But Mr. de Becker didn't provide forensic evidence and didn't
directly implicate Prince Mohammed.
In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Sanchez,
the brother of Mr. Bezos' girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, sold the
billionaire's secrets for $200,000 to American Media.
An October 2018 contract between Mr. Sanchez and American Media,
publisher of the National Enquirer, gave the company exclusive
rights to "certain information, photographs, and text messages
documenting an affair between Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez."
Mr. Sanchez "warrants and represents that he has acquired
Confidential Information lawfully," stated the contract, which was
reviewed by the Journal.
Mr. Sanchez on Wednesday declined to comment on the
investigation and said the Journal's previous reporting on him was
wrong, without providing any specifics. A representative of the
Manhattan U.S. attorney's office declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bezos and Lauren Sanchez didn't have a
comment Wednesday.
For nearly a year, federal prosecutors have been investigating
the National Enquirer's handling of a story it published about Mr.
Bezos' affair with Ms. Sanchez that included steamy texts, people
familiar with the matter said.
As part of their investigation, prosecutors have interviewed a
number of people, including Mr. Sanchez and more than a dozen
Enquirer employees over the past year, the people familiar with the
matter said.
The findings from the U.N. are based on the forensic audit Mr.
Bezos commissioned from FTI Consulting, a Washington-based business
advisory firm, according to people familiar with the matter. The
company's cybersecurity unit concluded with "medium to high
confidence" that Prince Mohammed's WhatsApp account was used to
compromise the Washington Post owner's phone.
In an interview, Ms. Callamard said the FTI investigation came
to her attention several months ago. She had been investigating the
relationship between phone hacking by Saudi Arabia and Mr.
Khashoggi's murder when a person she met in the course of her work
told her there was an "in-depth forensic study" in progress of Mr.
Bezos' phone. Later someone brought her the FTI report.
The FTI audit, a copy of which was published Wednesday by the
website Vice, drew skepticism from some independent cybersecurity
experts who said it lacked detail and didn't find evidence of
malware on Mr. Bezos' phone.
Bill Marczak, a researcher with Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which
has tracked Saudi uses of mobile malware, urged FTI investigators
to release more information.
WhatsApp wasn't contacted by FTI Consulting during its
investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter. A
spokesman for FTI Consulting declined to comment, saying all client
work is confidential.
Ms. Callamard and another U.N. official had tech experts review
the report; their conclusions "reinforced our confidence in the
findings from FTI, and it reinforced the urgency we saw in bringing
those allegations to the attention of Saudi Arabia and to the
international community," she said.
She said the saga began after Mr. Bezos and Prince Mohammed
exchanged friendly WhatsApp messages after meeting in Los Angeles
in April 2018 and sharing their numbers. About a month later, the
prince sent Mr. Bezos "a touristic video, like just some publicity
for Saudi Arabia," she said. That video file, FTI concluded, was
likely used to install spyware.
The FBI is continuing to investigate the phone hack, according
to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Bezos didn't want to
provide his phone directly to the FBI, so FTI Consulting, where
several former FBI officials work, conducted the investigation but
stayed in close communication with law enforcement, the person
said.
The audit found that a massive exfiltration of data from Mr.
Bezos' device began hours after receiving the encrypted video file
from Prince Mohammed, with the amount of outflowing data surging by
nearly 30,000% and continuing for months.
The findings prompted renewed concern about Saudi Arabia's use
of commercially available surveillance tools from Democratic
senators in Washington, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), who
wrote to Mr. Bezos requesting a copy of the FTI report and
additional information about the purported hack.
Companies that specialize in creating custom software for
clients to hack phones have proliferated in recent years, as
messaging services and computers have become harder to infiltrate
due to strong encryption.
While many of the firms said they cater to law-enforcement and
intelligence agencies that respect privacy and judicial process,
security researchers have documented several cases in which such
software has been used by governments in the Middle East and
elsewhere to track human-rights advocates, journalists and
political dissidents.
FTI's analysis of Mr. Bezos' phone said the apparent hack
appeared similar to other known cases that leveraged malware built
by companies such as Israel-based NSO Group. In the past, WhatsApp
has said NSO used a vulnerability in its video-calling service to
infect phones, but it didn't connect the company to hacks via MP4
video files.
U.N. investigators said such MP4 files appeared to be the
conduit through which Mr. Bezos' phone was compromised, noting
reports of Saudi Arabia using similar means to target others,
including associates of the slain Mr. Khashoggi.
NSO unequivocally denied its technology was used to target Mr.
Bezos. "We know this because of how our software works and our
technology cannot be used on U.S. phone numbers," the company said,
reiterating a denial it first made in April, after Mr. Bezos made
the hack public.
Facebook sued NSO Group late last year, alleging the company's
spyware had been used in attempts to infect the phones of 1,400
WhatsApp users, including targets chosen by NSO's
foreign-government clients. NSO Group disputed the allegations.
The U.N. experts also noted that Mr. Qahtani, the crown prince's
media adviser, was involved in organizing an online campaign
denouncing the Washington Post and calling for a boycott of
Amazon.
Mr. Qahtani, who was sanctioned by the U.S. for his role in the
Khashoggi killing, sought out spyware from NSO Group and one of its
affiliates, which began providing the kingdom with surveillance
tools in 2017 in a $55 million deal, The Wall Street Journal
previously reported.
Mr. Bezos once appeared to have a potentially lucrative
relationship with the Saudi government. Amazon came close to
striking a $1 billion deal to build three large data centers for
its highly profitable Amazon Web Services unit in the country.
Those discussions collapsed following the Mr. Khashoggi's
murder.
"The Post's essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of
its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain
circles," Mr. Bezos wrote in his blog post last year.
--Sebastian Herrera, Dov Leiber, Joe Palazzolo, Corinne Ramey,
Summer Said and Courtney McBride contributed to this article.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Justin Scheck
at justin.scheck@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 22, 2020 20:25 ET (01:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024