Experts Urge The Public To Beware Of Blackmail From WhatsApp Hacking Services

JAKARTA - Cybersecurity expert from Vaksincom, Alfons Tanujaya, appealed to the public to be aware of extortion carried out by service providers tapping WhatsApp.

"If someone says they can intercept encrypted WhatsApp, Signal, or Instagram (the conversion of information into a secret code so that it obscures the data sent, received, or stored), you need to be suspicious and don't believe it. This desire is used by fraudsters to get financial benefits," said Alfons in a written statement received in Jakarta, Friday, May 13.

Instead of successfully tapping WhatsApp, he continued, the service provider actually carried out extortion, namely if the victim did not pay the amount of money claimed for the wiretapping, the tapping action would be reported to the owner of the number to be tapped.

According to Alfons, WhatsApp has implemented a unique "end-to-end encryption" system for each conversation in order to maintain user privacy making it impossible for ordinary people to break the encryption.

"WhatsApp applies a unique 'end to end encryption' for each conversation where only the WhatsApp user's device has the key to open the encrypted conversation. Traffic between WhatsApp users can be intercepted easily, but because it is encrypted with this special key, the intercepted results will not be readable," explained Alfons.

In fact, he added, to crack WhatsApp encryption, an application equivalent to the Pegasus application is needed, which costs around US$500,000 or IDR 7 billion.

"The application can only be used by intelligence agencies and the government," said Alfons.

Furthermore, Alfons gave an example of an extortion case from a WhatsApp wiretapping service provider that was discovered by Vaksincom.

"There is an action from one of the blackmailers who is looking for victims through the Twitter account @jasasadapchat. He uses the innocence of his victims to get financial benefits," he said.

The blackmailer or fraudster, said Alfons, advertised that he was able to tap a number of applications, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with super and reliable capabilities, such as without touching the target's smartphone, without being noticed by the target, even the privacy of service users would be safe and reliable.

"If the victim is provoked and calls the number advertised, all kinds of nonsense are issued as long as the victim believes it," he said.

So far, Alfons said that there were quite a few victims of fraud and extortion from the Twitter account @jasasadapchat with losses estimated at hundreds of millions of rupiah.

"Although the Twitter account @jasasadapchat has been reported and blocked by Twitter, the account used to deceive and extort victims according to Vaccination's monitoring is still active and has not been closed," said Alfons.