How to be a hacked WhatsApp survivor & 3 insights to manage your professional network when hacked!
I had just woken up. I was still groggy. I did what wellness experts say you shouldn’t do. I looked at my WhatsApp the first thing and saw a message from a childhood friend who had moved to Thailand.
It said: “I sent you a message on SMS by mistake and it contains information I need. Please send it to me. Without this I am stuck. Please help!”
I had no reason to doubt this message. We had spoken the previous day, and our friendship goes down to when we were 4 years old. We have been in touch through school, through University, through her move to the U.S, Korea, and now Thailand. Our friendship is built on a strong foundation.
My immediate instinct was to give one of my closest friends what she asked for. I checked to see if I had received an SMS from her number, found it, and did what any good friend would do — I sent her the message. I even received a beautiful thank you message from her.
Satisfied that I had done my bit and made her day, I decided to roll back and get a little more shut-eye.
An hour later, I get a frantic call and a few frantic WhatsApp voice messages from her mum in India. It said that my friend’s WhatsApp Account had been hacked and that I should not respond to any messages from her number, and I should inform all our common friends.
It was too late for me since I had already responded to the message from her WhatsApp number. In any event, I informed our common network. She also put out a post on Facebook alerting her network.
12 hours later. I get another message from her number. This time it says: “This is me. This really is me. Ask me any question to validate this or I will send you a voice message as proof.”
It was indeed her. With a huge sigh of relief, I informed our network that things were back on track for her.
It was time for me to go to bed. I had just finished checking my messages on WhatsApp, and suddenly I found I had no access to it. I figured that my account had now been hacked.
It was too late for me to call my friend to ask her how she retrieved her account because our time zones were different, and she would definitely be asleep.
I tried to uninstall and reinstall it several times. It didn’t work.
I tried using a code I received on SMS. It didn’t work.
I dropped a social media post informing my network that my account had been hacked and messaged my phone contacts as well so that they could be safe.
I went to the WhatsApp website to check for solutions and see if there was a helpline, and all I could find was an email ID, and I sent an email with a request for help. I received a response a few hours later, which basically gave me the standard FAQ response on their website that I had already seen.
It bothered me a little because it affected the privacy of conversations on WhatsApp. I worried about the loss of important work-related data or information on important meetings.
But this didn’t bother me as much as the fact that the hacker could send messages from my number and dupe my network or get me a bad name by sending inapt messages especially to my professional/business network or get me kicked out of groups I am a part of through inapt messages.
I had 2 options. Option 1 was to stress and lose sleep. Option 2 was to sleep over it and hope for the best. I chose Option 2 because there was not much more that I could do.
The next morning I connected with my friend and figured what to do. So here are 3 insights on how to handle this situation.
First, send a message to your professional/personal network on social media; email; SMS, and/or phone calls alerting them of this and asking them to ignore any messages sent during the duration you had no access to WhatsApp.
You honestly have no idea what messages were sent out, and you don’t want the network to think it’s you. More importantly, you don’t want your network to get conned by the hacker like you got conned and you want to protect your network. This is not foolproof but this is the best that you can do.
Second, while alerting your network, ask them to check their WhatsApp settings and request them to enable the 2 Step Verification Code.
The hacker will block you out for around 12 hours. So during this time even if you use your verification code, you won’t be able to retrieve your account even if you delete and reinstall the app several times in this 12-hour frame. So wait for a 12-hour time frame, by which time you would have received an SMS with a WhatsApp Code that will work.
Once you get access back, you will need to re-enable your 2 Step Verification Code.
Third, once you get access back, please let your network know through a voice message on WhatsApp and through social media; email; SMS, and/or phone calls that it is indeed you.
Why is this important for you?
One, whether you are a Corporate/Business Leader, Executive or Team Member, whether you are an Entrepreneur or Working Professional, you will doubtless be using WhatsApp as a way to communicate with internal stakeholders/clients. You would also have several personal conversations. Either way, you would want to maintain the privacy of these conversations.
Two, you would want to make sure that you don’t lose data or conversations linked to scheduled meetings or documents you may have sent on the go through WhatsApp for ease of communication.
Three, your professional/business network would have your clients, your leaders, influencers, team members, service providers, and business partners amongst others. You really do want to protect them and help them stay secure. You also want to make sure they don’t lose trust in you because they think you sent inapt messages or messages to misguide them.
So if you haven’t already, take out a few minutes to set up your 2-Step Verification Code on WhatsApp and ask your professional/business network to do the same.
Here is one bonus tip for you.
Telegram is a relatively new platform for communication and works in almost the same way as WhatsApp. So from a functional perspective, you would not have trouble getting your teams and your network used to communicating through Telegram.
From a security perspective, experts say that while Telegram can be hacked too, it also has security measures in the form of a 2 Step Verification. However, it has a feature that isn’t available on WhatsApp that makes it appear to be more reliable. It has an option to create a “Secret Chat”, which is an encrypted conversation between 2 people. You can also configure the messages to self-destruct after a certain period of time so that the privacy of your conversations remains.
I wish more success to each Leader, each Team Member, each Organization, and each Business. Keep striving! Keep evolving! Keep shining!
If you resonated with this, please share this with the person who you feel needs to read or hear this the most.
Cheers,
Namrata Vishwanath
If you are a Corporate/Business Leader or Executive and would like to learn how to build your career, teams, and business through building a leadership mindset and skills, please join the Leader by Design Hub & click on the link for more information: https://linktr.ee/namratavishwanath