A United Nations investigator involved in evaluating the hack of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s cellphone urged others who have communicated with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to replace their phones.
President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has reportedly used encrypted messaging app WhatsApp to text with Mohammed. It’s the same method Bezos used to communicate with the crown prince, who has been accused of sending the Amazon founder a message containing spyware that was able to extract large amounts of data from the phone.
“I will hope that Donald Trump’s son-in-law and anyone else is at the moment changing their phone, checking their phone, and contacting the best cybersecurity experts so that we can get to the bottom of that hacking strategy and policy,” U.N. investigator Agnes Callamard told CNN.
“What is important with Jeff Bezos’s case is that we now have proof that the Saudis do not only target the phones of dissents living abroad — they also include the phones and the mobile technology in general of people of strategic interest to Saudi Arabia,” she said.
The Saudi Embassy in Washington denied that the kingdom was behind the hacking, calling the reports “absurd.”
