If you see messages in individual chats or groups that you have not sent, you can start to suspect. Perhaps someone has entered your mobile or has sent a message pretending to be you and without your consent. Start to suspect. The logical thing is that you remember, more or less, what messages you have sent or not in all conversations, whether group or individual. If you see something that doesn't fit or there are photographs that don't sound familiar to you, take measures and take precautions.

Changes in the photograph you had on your profile, in the WhatsApp status phrase or in the name you have on. If you have not changed it and they have been changed, someone may be trying to steal your account or there are signs that they are trying. You may not remember changing your photo or simply changing your phone and removing the profile picture you were showing, but watch for this type of behavior to detect possible account theft or possible dangers

If you have not uninstalled WhatsApp and reinstalled it, but you receive an SMS with a verification code, it will be because someone is trying to access your account on your mobile phone without your permission. In that case, never tell anyone this code. Never and under no circumstances should we give the WhatsApp verification code to anyone or enter it in any application that asks for it except in the official application. Neither in applications that add functions such as changing the color letters or saving the states. You should never give it to anyone because you will give them access to all your data, your chats, etc.

How can they hack us or spy on us?

Luckily, there are ways to know if your service account has been hacked and in the following lines I want to talk about the most well-known forms of hacking (although some are impossible today, but many people still believe it is possible) and how to solve them.

whatsapp web

WhatsApp Web is perhaps the easiest way to “hack” or spy on a service account, so it is also the most used method. It is not a complex hack because it is enough for you to leave the session open on a public computer for someone to enter to read your conversations, so you must be especially careful in this case, close it manually or remotely whenever you remember.

The reason is that making the connection is very fast, the spy only needs to have access to the mobile for a few seconds to read the QR code and log in. Once the session is started, you can connect whenever you want and you will not receive any notification that the session is open.

If you are in this situation, there are some things that can give you clues. For example, that you know that you have received a message and you have not read it, but that it appears as read (if you open the conversation on WhatsApp Web it will also appear as read on your mobile). Once this is done, the hacker will stop having access to your conversations and will also stop receiving new messages. Also, he won't be able to log back in unless he has a moment alone with your device again.

To close our open sessions on WhatsApp, what we must do is:

This way you will delete all the open sessions in WhatsApp that you have left on any computer.

Duplicate the account in two mobiles

With the security measures that WhatsApp currently has, you can be calm, this will not happen.

When you activate the service on a mobile, you must confirm the activation with a code that you receive by SMS at the phone number associated with the account. In addition, when activating the device on which it was previously working, it will no longer be operational, so you will not receive new messages and they will only reach the mobile on which you just activated it.

spy software

There are some applications that are installed on Android and iPhone devices and are capable of showing all WhatsApp conversations to another person remotely. They are the famous spy apps and just like what happens with WhatsApp Web, the hacker needs to have physical access to the device, in this case for a longer time than with the other option, since he has to install the software.

In addition, in the case of iOS, some of these applications also require access to the iCloud account and active backups in the cloud, since they really take the information from the backups and do not do it in real time.

Once installed on the device, these applications are capable of transmitting all the information on the terminal to a panel that the attacker can use to see all the information they want. WhatsApp conversations, calls, photos, even a record of all keystrokes.

This type of software is quite difficult to detect. Some evidence that it may be installed on your device is that it gets too hot when you are not using it, that suddenly the battery consumption increases alarmingly or even that the mobile data consumption goes up for no apparent reason.

If you suspect that you may have software of this type on your mobile, the most effective and fastest way to get rid of it is to restore the device to factory settings and configure it as new.

If after all these checks we can confirm that someone has hacked our account, what we will have to do is try to recover it as soon as possible. Now, it is advisable to take all the appropriate measures within our reach to prevent our WhatsApp account from being stolen. From the previous link you can see everything we can do to prevent our account from being stolen.

What to do if your account has been hacked

If everything confirms our suspicions and finally someone has stolen or hacked our WhatsApp account, this is what we should do to avoid further problems:

The first thing we should do as soon as we realize that our WhatsApp account has been stolen is to inform our operator of the situation and request the SIM card to be blocked. In this way, the card will be inoperative and no one will be able to use WhatsApp with that same card.

Another recommendation is to inform WhatsApp itself of the situation and request that the account be blocked. We must know that blocking the app account does not imply that all the information associated with it is deleted, in addition, the messages pending to be sent remain on hold for 30 days, so we will receive them once we have established our WhatsApp account .

We request a duplicate SIM card from our operator to continue using the same phone number and then we will install WhatsApp again associated with our number with the new SIM on another device. This way we can continue using the same number and recover the messages that our contacts had sent us during the period of time that we have had our account blocked

Improve privacy and security

There are some tricks that can prevent hacking… They will not guarantee that no one will spy on us, but we can prevent this from happening in most cases. Beyond common sense (don't tell anyone your password or give your verification code) and protect the chat on WhatsApp Web there are other tricks.

Check your logged in sessions and close them

Delete all the sessions in which you have logged in on computers or WhatsApp Web. Go to the messaging app, tap on the three dots in the upper right corner and go to the “Linked devices” option. Here you can see all the devices you are logged in on.

You can touch one by one to eliminate them. You will know on which device and with which operating system or from what time the session is open. Close all of them as usual.

Activate two-step verification

Once we have followed the previous steps, we must add an important prophylaxis measure to avoid new hacks. This is something that we must also do regardless of whether we have been hacked or not, since when we talk about privacy, all precaution is little. This measure is to activate two-step verification, something that protects the registration of your phone number on another phone by requiring a PIN code that is sent to the mobile associated with the account in order to log in.

To do so, you just have to access the WhatsApp settings in the “Settings” section. Once here, access “Account” and “Verification in two steps”. Finally, click on the “Activate” option and enter a six-digit PIN that will be required to log in to the WhatsApp mobile application when you do it for the first time and an email. You can deactivate it by following these steps or change the PIN and the entered email whenever you need.

protect your phone

It is basic and will allow no one to enter your WhatsApp unless you want it. The more you protect the phone, the better your WhatsApp application will be protected. In addition, you can also protect WhatsApp with a fingerprint regardless of the lock you have on the mobile screen. This will require the fingerprint or the iris to access the phone, but also to access the app when it is unlocked.

Once here, we will have several options to choose how often the chat is blocked.

And a last button where we can choose if you want there to be a preview of the sender and the text in the notifications of new messages or if you want them not to be seen in the notification window. The second option will allow us to be much more protected if we do not want anyone to read our messages.