> De Becker then commissioned an examination of Bezos’s iPhone X. The eventual report by Anthony Ferrante, a longtime colleague of de Becker’s and the former director for cyber incident response for the U.S. National Security Council, concluded that the promotional video about broadband prices that MBS had sent Bezos the previous year likely contained a copy of Pegasus, a piece of nearly invisible malware created by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once the program was activated, Ferrante found, the volume of data leaving Bezos’s smartphone increased by about 3,000 percent.
> The eventual report by Anthony Ferrante, a longtime colleague of de Becker’s and the former director for cyber incident response for the U.S. National Security Council, concluded that the promotional video about broadband prices that MBS had sent Bezos the previous year likely contained a copy of Pegasus, a piece of nearly invisible malware created by an Israeli company called NSO Group.
Key word in that sentence: "likely." AFAIK, nothing has been proven beyond rumor and conjecture, which isn't proof of anything at all.
Did they find the Pegasus or related code on the phone, or not? That is a yes or no answer. Likely?
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Given what we know about this hack — a Whatsapp or iMessage essentially taking over his whole phone — this seems plausible.
It's not a contradiction. Whoever would have ordered NSO or similar actor to hack Bezos' phone is probably after more juicy info than a dick pic or at least wouldn't leak it for 'lulz' and thereby revealing that the phone is compromised somehow.
> De Becker then commissioned an examination of Bezos’s iPhone X. The eventual report by Anthony Ferrante, a longtime colleague of de Becker’s and the former director for cyber incident response for the U.S. National Security Council, concluded that the promotional video about broadband prices that MBS had sent Bezos the previous year likely contained a copy of Pegasus, a piece of nearly invisible malware created by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once the program was activated, Ferrante found, the volume of data leaving Bezos’s smartphone increased by about 3,000 percent.