The hacking of Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos’ phone in 2018 is now being attributed to a Saudi prince, according to sources quoted by The Guardian.

The report claims that Bezos’ phone was hacked after receiving a WhatsApp message sent from the personal account of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The message, sent in May 2018 is said to have contained a malicious video that was later found to have malware that allowed “large amounts of data” to be removed from the phone.

The report doesn’t go as far as claiming that the crown prince himself was directly behind the attack, but it says the “extraordinary revelation that the future king of Saudi Arabia may have had a personal involvement in the targeting of the American founder of Amazon will send shockwaves from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.”

The story certainly makes for sensational headlines but that’s part of the issue. The Guardian never quotes its sources and portrays the story that the Saudi links to the Bezos phone hacking are new, but the Saudi links to the phone hacking are not new.

Gavin De Becker, a private security specialist employed by Bezos after the National Enquirer published conversations between Bezos and his girlfriend, former television anchor Lauren Sanchez, said in March that the Saudi government was behind the hack. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, so the government is the crown.

The crown prince, who has run the country since 2017, presuming Saudi Arabia was indeed behind the hack, would at the very least have been aware of the hacking and likely to have endorsed it, regardless of whether he was directly sending malware messages to Bezos.

The Saudi government has previously denied being involved in the hacking of Bezos’ phone and has yet to comment on The Guardian report.

Photo: jdlasica/Flickr