The hack of Amazon.com Inc. billionaire Jeff Bezos\u2019s phone, allegedly via a WhatsApp message, brings to light potential security weaknesses in smartphone operating systems, Facebook Inc. vice president Nicola Mendelsohn said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that it highlights is actually some of the potential underlying vulnerabilities that exist on the actual operating systems on phones,\u201d Mendelsohn said in a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Bezos\u2019s iPhone may\u00a0have been hacked\u00a0after he received a message via Facebook\u2019s WhatsApp messaging platform, from Saudi Arabia\u2019s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, according to a November 2019 report by FTI Consulting Inc., a business advisory firm, which was published by Vice.<\/p>\n
The message included a 4.22 MB video. Within hours of receiving it, \u201ca massive and unauthorized exfiltration of data from Bezos\u2019s phone began,\u201d according to the report. The Saudi Embassy has denied involvement in the hack, calling the allegations \u201cabsurd.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apple Inc. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Mendelsohn, who helps run Facebook\u2019s Europe, Middle East and Africa business, said that the company would take any allegations that its service was used in a hack very seriously and would look into it, but said the company couldn\u2019t \u201ccomment on any individual story.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the first time WhatsApp\u2019s been drawn into a hacking controversy. WhatsApp in November\u00a0sued\u00a0Israeli spyware maker NSO Group, accusing it of infecting phones of some users through the messaging app. The lawsuit said that NSO Group used a vulnerability in WhatsApp, since patched, to secretly deliver its surveillance software to users. NSO denied the claims in the lawsuit and said it would \u201cvigorously fight them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hack of Amazon.com Inc. billionaire Jeff Bezos\u2019s phone, allegedly via a WhatsApp message, brings to light potential security weaknesses in smartphone operating systems, Facebook Inc. vice president Nicola Mendelsohn said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":268793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[161,4246,62746,2594],"class_list":["post-336092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-facebook","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-mohammed-bin-salman","tag-whatsapp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336094,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336092\/revisions\/336094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}