How A Student Hacked Teachers WhatsApp

How A Student Hacked into Teachers WHATSAPP Account?

A teacher from Kerala noticed that her WhatsApp account was logged out soon after an online class. Knowing this, she lodged a complaint with cyberpolice. Police cracked the case and found out that the culprit was her student, studying in high school, who logged into the teacher’s account.

The technique used by the student was simple. The teacher was using a screen-share app in her phone during the class. So the students were able to see the screen and also the pop-up notification alerts coming into the phone. The ‘culprit’ student then tried to login WhatsApp with teacher’s number in his phone. And the OTP for verification came as pop-up alert in the teacher’s phone which was visible for all the students. Thus the student easily logged in to the account. The teacher did not have two-step verification on the phone and did not have a password.

The account in teacher’s phone got logged out as WhatsApp does not allow simultaneous use on two different devices. After the police cracked the case and found out the culprit is the student, the teacher withdrew the complaint.

PRECAUTIONS to avoid hacking

With some simple steps, one can avoid getting hacked during screen-sharing. Disable the notification alerts when sharing the screen with others.

Also enable two-step verification for WhatsApp login, so that an additional password is required to login to WhatsApp through other devices.

Soon after screen-sharing, make sure that OTPs or verification messages were not received during the time.

Adv (Dr.) Prashant Mali

Cyber & Privacy Lawyer & Author

21 Months Jail & $77000 fine for Sabotaging CITI Bank Network(Cyber Crime) in 2013

21 Months Jail & $77,000 Fine for Sabotaging CITI Bank Network in 2013

Ex staff of Citibank named Lennon Ray Brown was sentenced to Jail for 21 months along with a $77,000 fine by a Texas court (U.S. District C. Godbey ) for sabotaging the bank’s internal network, The Register reports. Lennon Ray Brown, who worked at the bank’s Irving office, said he wanted to get back at management for "firing" him after he was called out for poor job performance.

Brown had been working at Citibank's Irving, Texas, corporate office since 2012, first as a contractor and later as a staff employee, when he was called in by a manager and reprimanded for poor performance.Brown, 38, admitted that on December 23, 2013, he issued commands to wipe the configuration files on 10 core routers within Citibank's internal network.Brown deliberately uploaded commands to the bank's Global Control Center routers that deleted the configuration files, ultimately congesting network traffic and resulting in an outage in network and phone access to around 90% of Citibank branches across the US.

Specifically, at approximately 6:03 p.m. that evening, Brown knowingly transmitted a code and command to 10 core Citibank Global Control Center routers, and by transmitting that code, erased the running configuration files in nine of the routers, resulting in a loss of connectivity to approximately 90% of all Citibank networks across North America.  At 6:05 p.m. that evening, Brown scanned his employee identification badge to exit the Citibank Regents Campus.

At the sentencing hearing, where the Court referred to Brown’s conduct as “criminal vandalism,” the government read a text that Brown sent to a coworker shortly after he shut down Citibank’s system that read, “They was firing me. I just beat them to it. Nothing personal, the upper management need to see what they guys on the floor is capable of doing when they keep getting mistreated. I took one for the team. Sorry if I made my peers look bad, but sometimes it take something like what I did to wake the upper management up.”

Source: United States Department of Justice