Cyber Expert Behind A Report On Saudi Arabia’s Alleged Bezos Hack Was Paid $4 Million To Verify Steele Dossier

One of the experts who spearheaded a forensics report alleging Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hacked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s phone was also part of an attempt to verify the Steele dossier.

Bezos’s iPhone began sharing large amounts of data after receiving an encrypted video file from bin Salman’s WhatsApp account in May 2018, according to a November 2019 report cobbled together by Anthony Ferrante, a cyber expert at the advisory firm FTI Consulting. The report, which Vice News published Wednesday, concluded with “medium to high confidence” that the crown prince’s phone was involved.

BuzzFeed asked Ferrante, a former FBI agent who joined CNN as a contributor in 2019, to investigate the Steele dossier’s claims that Russian tech executive Aleksej Gubarev played a “significant” role in hacking Democrats’ computer systems. BuzzFeed published the full dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

Ferrante determined that Gubarev’s companies “have provided gateways to the internet for cybercriminals and Russian state sponsored actors to launch and control large-scale malware campaigns over the past decade.”

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