Apparently it’s hacking season on whatsapp and thousands of phone numbers have been targeted by hackers to carry out illegal activities like spamming and worse still financial fraud.
Some people don’t even know when their number has been hacked while they carry on with their normal activities.
Here a few steps to enable you know when you have been hacked and what you can do to prevent it.
How Do I Know My Account has Been Hacked?
Most people have no idea they have been hacked till they are kicked off WhatsApp, and get a message like this.
One of the first signs that your WhatsApp has been taken over is when the app starts to malfunction.
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At this stage, while other internet based apps are functioning optimally, WhatsApp begins to hang and messages remain undelivered, after a while it tries to restart itself in the background and a prompt pops up saying “searching for WhatsApp messages”.
Later on, your contacts start to receive spam messages from you without being aware of the fact.
These messages, usually advertising Ponzi schemes keep popping from your number on most groups you belong to. At this point you begin to notice that you’re being kicked out of your groups without explanation.
What Happens Next?
One day you wake up, unable to access your whatsapp. At this stage, the hackers have already registered it on another phone and have access to your groups and contacts.
Before WhatsApp started to restrict the number of broadcast messages an account could send, hackers would have sent multiple BCs spamming and spreading fake news with your account.
What happens this time however is that they start to spam all your groups while attempting to harvest any personal information linked to your account including personal banking information.
All this while you’re trying to retrieve your WhatsApp by following the prompts. The hackers notice this and proceed to install a two way protection pin on your account, now they have almost complete control.
In order to prevent you from gaining back control of the account, the hackers then proceed to input the two way pin wrongly five times so that WhatsApp suspends your number and you get this message.
What Do I Do?
The best and only way to secure your WhatsApp is to enable a two way verification pin NOW. If you wait till your phone is hacked, it may be too late.
To set up the two way verification pin, open the app and tap the three dots on the top right of the screen.
Then click on Settings which takes you to Account where you select the two step verification.
Hit enable and input any six digit PIN of your choice. Make sure this is something that is easy to remember to you but complicated for others.
Once your pin is set up, WhatsApp will ask you for it immediately so you won’t forget.
On a final note…
There’s a final stage where you will have to input your email, although this isn’t necessary, it will help you recover your pin if you forget it.
If your account has been hacked already, just follow the slow, torturing route to recovering your number through the WhatsApp prompt.
By the time you’re done, most of your messages will have been wiped out, including the ones that dropped when you couldn’t access the app.