UN staff have stopped using WhatsApp since June due to security risks
United Nations officials have stopped using WhatsApp since June last year, because the organization has doubts about its security. On Thursday, it turned out that the US wants an investigation into the hack of Jeff Bezos’ phone, which would have happened via WhatsApp.
United Nations spokesman Farhan Haq said senior UN officials have been instructed not to use WhatsApp because it “is not supported as a secure mechanism,” Reuters writes. “I believe the Secretary General is not using it.” It is not known whether António Guterres, the highest official of the UN, actually does not use it. According to Haq, there has been an instruction not to use WhatsApp since June last year.
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 was co-developed with Signal and is highly regarded among security experts.
The UN has been questioned about this matter because of the fuss that arose around the hack of the phone of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. His phone is said to have been hacked after he received a video from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia via WhatsApp. The United Nations says the forensic report published by Motherboard says the hack likely used spyware that is more common in other Saudi surveillance cases. This probably refers to the Pegasus-3 malware of the Israeli NSO Group. This malware, and the method of sending it via WhatsApp, has been associated more often with Saudi intelligence and intelligence agencies.
Saudi Arabia denies any involvement in the hack, but the UN wants further investigations. The UN also says it has information indicating that coverage of Saudi Arabia by The Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Bezos, may have been influenced by the possible hack. Critical Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi worked there, who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey last year. According to the UN, the circumstances and timing of Bezos’ hack give rise to further investigations into the allegations that the crown prince was at least aware of the murder.
Other security researchers argue that the forensic report leaves important questions open. For example, Bill Marczak, researcher at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, points out that the hash of the video should be comparable to versions of the video that appeared on Twitters, that the encrypted downloader with the video should be decryptable and that the spikes in smartphone traffic may also have other causes and need not be unusual.