Since June, UN employees no longer use WhatsApp due to security risks – Computer – News

United Nations officials have not used WhatsApp since June last year because the organization has doubts about security. Thursday it turned out that the US wants an investigation into the hack of the telephone of Jeff Bezos, which would have happened via WhatsApp.

A United Nations spokesperson, Farhan Haq, indicates that senior UN officials have been instructed not to use WhatsApp because it is “not supported as a secure mechanism,” Reuters writes. “I don’t think the Secretary General is using it.” It is not known whether António Guterres, the highest official of the UN, actually uses it. According to Haq, since June last year there has been an instruction not to use WhatsApp.

In a response, WhatsApp communications director Carl Woog emphasizes that every private message is protected by end-to-end encryption to prevent WhatsApp or others from viewing messages. The company states that this encryption technology has been developed together with Signal and is highly regarded among security experts.

The UN has been questioned about this issue by the fuss that has arisen around the hack of the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. His phone was said to have been hacked after he received a video via WhatsApp from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The United Nations states that the forensic report published by Motherboard states that the hack was probably used with spyware that is more common in other Saudi surveillance cases. This probably refers to the Pegasus-3 malware from the Israeli NSO Group. This malware and the method of sending it via WhatsApp has been associated more often with the Saudi investigation and intelligence services.

Saudi Arabia denies all involvement in the hack, but the UN wants further investigation. The UN also says it has information that the reporting of the Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Bezos, about Saudi Arabia may have been influenced by the possible hack. The critical Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Turkish embassy last year, worked there. According to the UN, the circumstances and timing of the Bezos hack give cause for further investigation into the allegations that the crown prince was at least aware of the murder.

Other security investigators state that the forensic report leaves important questions open. For example, Bill Marczak, researcher at UC Berkeleys International Computer Science Institute, explains that the hash of the video should be comparable to versions of the video that appeared on Twitters, that the encrypted downloader should be decryptable with the video and that the peaks in the traffic of the smartphone can also have other causes and need not be unusual.

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