Is someone secretly reading your WhatsApp chats? Check these settings now, otherwise you will suffer huge losses: – ..

News India Live, Digital Desk: Nowadays WhatsApp has become such a part of our daily life that it seems difficult to do without it. From starting in the morning till sleeping at night, we depend on it for many tasks. But have you thought, how dangerous this trust can prove to be sometimes? These days a new and very vicious scam has emerged, whose name is ‘Ghostpairing’. It is spreading so fast that your WhatsApp account can be hacked in the blink of an eye, and the most shocking thing is that hackers neither need your password, nor your one-time password (OTP) for this!

How dangerous is this game?

This scam often starts with a simple message sent by a known friend or relative. Imagine you get a message from someone close to you saying, “Hey, I found this photo of you!” Or any other similar message, which also has a link attached to it. Many times this link looks like a photo preview in the WhatsApp chat itself, due to which we think that it is actually a photo. As soon as you click on the link to view that photo without thinking, you are redirected to a fake page.

This fake page looks exactly like the twin brother of a real website like Facebook. There you are told that to see the photo you will have to do a small verification, this is where the whole game starts. This verification actually activates the ‘Linked Devices’ feature of WhatsApp. On this fake page you are asked for your phone number. As soon as you enter your number, a special pairing code is generated for you on WhatsApp.

Hackers assure you that this code is just a security check, there is no need to panic but as soon as you enter that code in your WhatsApp, you unknowingly connect the hacker’s browser to your WhatsApp. What after this? The hacker gets complete control over your entire account through WhatsApp Web. He can read all your messages, see your files, and what’s more, he can send messages to anyone on your behalf and you will not even know that your chat has been taken over by someone else.

Why is this deception so difficult to detect?

The strangest thing about this scam is that there is no glitch in WhatsApp’s software.(1)Hackers simply take advantage of the app’s ‘device linking’ feature(1)Your phone also works normally, so you don’t even realize that someone else is reading your messages or using your account,(1)This is the reason why this scam spreads so quickly from one contact to another, because we often easily trust the messages sent by people we know,(1),

Then what should we do? How to stay safe?

It is natural to feel a little nervous after hearing all this, but by adopting some precautions you can protect yourself from this danger.

• Avoid unknown or suspicious links: Do not click on any link that seems even slightly strange to you, even if it is sent by one of your close friends because their accounts may also have already been hacked.
• Don’t share the code with anyone: If any website or message asks you to enter any code in WhatsApp, then be careful and never do so. WhatsApp never asks you for any code directly
• Keep two-step verification on: Always keep ‘Two-Step Verification’ turned on on your WhatsApp account. This is an additional layer of security, making it difficult for your account to be hacked.
• Enable security notifications: Go to the ‘Account’ section of WhatsApp’s Settings and turn on ‘Security Notifications’. You’ll get an instant alert if someone tries to connect a new device to your account

A little awareness can save you from this big online fraud. Stay safe yourself and also tell your friends and family about this new danger.