WARNING! Your WhatsApp can hack your Privacy. Protect it!

WARNING!! YOUR WHATSAPP CAN BE THE SOURCE OF YOUR PRIVACY ! PROTECT YOURSELF FROM HACKERS ! HERE ARE SOME TIPS ! 

Are you enjoying the Lockdown? Probably not! But somehow you are busy in your phone so here is a special post for your security. Your Whatsapp can be the source of your privacy and may be with your account! So read this post carefully and make sure you wanna implement in your life. 

 Your WhatsApp account can be totally stolen as long as your attacker knows your number and can have a quick glance at your phone's screen.

Your phone doesn't need to be unlocked, they don't need your WhatsApp password or your email address, and they'll probably get an archive of all their WhatsApp chats and call logs as well once they've hijacked the account. This attack would easily work against co-workers, roommates, spouses, classmates then on.

It would even work against someone you're having lunch or coffee with, or your boss. All your target needs is for you to go away your phone alone for a couple of seconds, like once you attend the toilet. (lol).

 ESET security researcher Jake Moore walked us through this process in a blog post  and honestly, it seemed too good to be true. But I tried it myself  and much to my horror, it totally worked.

At this point, I would normally tell you to protect yourself with one of the best password managers or some of the best antivirus software.

 But this rather ridiculous security hole doesn't involve passwords or malware. Fortunately, there's any easy way to avoid this kind of attack:

You need to enable a PIN on your WhatsApp account, one that you'll need to enter when porting your account to a new phone.

 You might want to also disable text-message previews, although I know that's totally inconvenient.

How this attack works Moore's method is ridiculously easy. Here are the steps someone needs to take to steal your WhatsApp account.

1. Install WhatsApp on a phone where it's not already installed.

2. Wait for your target to walk away from their own phone. 

3. When WhatsApp asks you for your telephone number , type in your target's number instead.

 4. WhatsApp will text a six-digit one-time-use confirmation code to your target's phone.

 5. If your target's phone has text-message previews enabled -- and almost all phones, iOS or Android, do -- then the confirmation code will appear as a preview on their phone's screen.

  6. Type in confirmation code within the WhatsApp on your phone. The message you'll see when moving WhatsApp to a new Android phone. 

SEE: MAKE A SIMPLE GAME AND BE A BILLIONAIRE!

 It took us 10 seconds to try to to this on two phones we own. We didn't got to unlock the primary device to ascertain the confirmation code, because it popped abreast of the lockscreen. The trickiest part was memorizing it, because it was only onscreen for a couple of seconds. 

Because a WhatsApp account can only be running on one phone, the account was transferred from one to the opposite . If you were doing this to somebody else , they might lose access to their own account.

 Following the transfer, I was prompted to port all the info that WhatsApp had protected to Google Drive (or iCloud) to the new phone. Since I want to move the account back to the first phone, I didn't do that. But Moore did, and he was able to view all the archived chats of a co-worker whose account he stole using this message.

 (He had her consent to do so, and restored her account on her phone once his experiment was done.) 

How to protect your WhatsApp account Needless to say, you do not want someone else stealing your WhatsApp account. The best way to avoid this is to add a PIN to your account. 

WhatsApp calls this two-step verification, which it is, but that's not to be confused with two-factor authentication (2FA). WhatsApp's rather lame implementation of 2FA is what got us into trouble here in the first place. 

Anyhow, you just need to go into your WhatsApp settings, tap Account, then tap Two-Step Verification. 

You'll be prompted to create a six-digit PIN that you'll need to enter again next time your port your WhatsApp account to a new phone. You'll also probably want to enter an email address that will serve as a failsafe in case your forget that PIN. 

SEE: Earn from Programming Language! 

Moore suggests turning off SMS-message previews on your lockscreen, which is probably a good idea in theory. But it's going to make using your phone a lot less convenient.

 However, I do agree that you should never leave your phone unattended when you're out of the house -- or even while in the house if you don't trust your roommates! (Lol).

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