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immediately I arrived in Lima last week and I did what countless travelers do every day: go to a mobile phone store and buy a SIM card with a local number. But this usually mundane ritual is no more exciting than exchanging US dollars for euros, and it was soon unexpected-I hacked into a criminal network.
When I was planning my trip, drugs were the last thing I thought of. In the vibrant days before Omicron, Peru felt like a dream, a dose of warmth and sunshine before returning to New York’s bleak winter. But a few minutes after I left the Movistar store, with a phone number on hand, I found my new holiday pastime: tell people that their phone number is wrong. I thought it would be a small annoyance, I sent a few text messages before people passed the word. But when I installed WhatsApp, things got even stranger.
The problem started with the discordant home screen. What I see is not a new list of new accounts, but a list of dozens of groups of which I am obviously already a member. Even though my Spanish is embarrassingly poor, terms like “dark web” are prominent, and sexually suggestive emojis don’t need translation. Then I started to receive messages. Although most of you will never find yourself involved in criminal gangs in Peru, your digital life faces exactly the same loopholes.
WhatsApp is encrypted, so people can speak frankly with confidence. They started talking a lot about drugs, sex work, and other terms that I didn’t want to translate. People told me about the upcoming delivery, mentioning places I had never heard of. I was in paradise, sitting next to the rooftop swimming pool, overlooking the beach and cliffs of Miraflores, and had a panic attack.
I started playing scenes from cheesy gangster movies where a naive bystander was killed for watching too much. So I deleted everything. Every message, every group. I even use mental exercises to blur my memory and force myself to forget. But people continue to lend a helping hand. When I continued to explain that they had found the wrong person, they insisted: “Delete the number!”
This is how I ended up providing cybersecurity advice to criminal gangs. I promised to delete the account and switch numbers, but then I explained how they were stolen.Like many WhatsApp accounts, my ex did not password, The security feature of opt-in can accurately prevent me from accidentally doing things, taking over another person’s account, which is actually another person’s world. I can get a new number, but without a PIN, the next person who gets the number lent to me by Movistar will eventually face exactly the same horror.
Like almost all countries in South America, WhatsApp is the most popular communication platform in Peru. In some countries, Facebook-owned applications are so ubiquitous that It effectively replaced text messages, Allows users to circumvent telephone company charges and connect reliably in areas with poor cell coverage. Of course, another attraction is security. However, while encryption is essential, it is not enough. End-to-end encryption means that neither Facebook nor anyone who intercepts your message can read what you write. But they can know everything else. With WhatsApp, they know who your contacts are, which groups you belong to, and when you send messages to whom.
although WhatsApp supports two-factor authentication since 2017, It is never a default requirement. No one knows exactly how many of WhatsApp’s 2 billion accounts are insecure. WhatsApp should force the use of a PIN, or at least the default setting. But it is not alone. Not only do encrypted messenger platforms like Signal have similar vulnerabilities, but many other platforms also have similar vulnerabilities. Even after I deleted WhatApp, I still continued to receive a large number of text messages from banks and payment applications, all of which wanted to confirm the identities of other people.
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