One single vulnerability is all an attacker needs

“Treasure, I'm so sorry to bother you but please if you can send me 50,000 naira between today and Friday I would be really grateful”

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When I woke up to see this message from Patty on WhatsApp, I immediately checked my account balance to see if I had spare money I could send to her but since I didn't, I sent her a text asking her to give me some time to hustle the money.

I was worried because Patty had never asked me for anything before. I was not even close to her, she was just the cousin of one of my male friends, Absalom, and we had met only once during a picnic. It was strange that she would come and suddenly ask me for that kind of huge amount of money. I knew that for her to ask me, she was in dire need.

The following morning by 5 am, I received a beep call from Patty and a message asking if I had gotten the money to send to her.

It was becoming alarming and I decided that when I saw Absalom I was going to ask him what was going on. Unfortunately, I didn't see Absalom throughout that week and the whole drama with Patty skipped my mind until the following Sunday.

I received a call from a strange number some time in the afternoon when I was trying to get some beauty sleep. Disgruntled, I picked the call and held the phone to my ear, waiting for the caller to speak up.

“Hello, can you hear me?”

It was definitely a familiar voice but I couldn't place the owner so I said I could hear her and waited for an introduction.

“It's Patty, I'm not sure you remember me…”

“Oh, Patricia!” I was the only one who called her Patricia and I did it to be sure she was the one I was talking to.

“Thank goodness you remember me. I was worried that the messages that were being sent to you would make you hold a grudge against me. Please, my WhatsApp was hacked and all those messages you received were not from me”

I never heard that someone's WhatsApp could be hacked, I had heard stories of Facebook and Instagram but that was my first time hearing about WhatsApp being hacked.

“When you discover your WhatsApp was hacked?”

“I kept receiving calls from my friends asking what was going on. The guy that hacked the account wasn't even smart, he gave his account number and told them that they should send money to him. That was when they knew that something was wrong”

I shook my head in wonder. Who would hack into Patty's account and why? She definitely had a password or a form of security on her phone, how was it that her WhatsApp was hacked into?

She hung up the call after apologizing profusely for the guy's stunt.

I sat there in wonder for so many minutes before picking my phone up to call Absalom.

He picked up after the third ring and he sounded so devastated. I knew Absalom, he was someone who carried a lot of vibe, I had never even heard him as depressed as he sounded on that particular day. When I asked him what the problem was, he gave a heavy sigh. I knew that all was not well.

“I just lost 50,000 naira,” he told me. I put one and one together and found out that the guy that hacked into Patty's WhatsApp account must have contacted him as well.

“That's so sad, what are you going to do about it now?”

“There's nothing to be done, I just have to accept the reality. Funny thing is I got that money from the savings for my rent”

I felt really bad for him but like he said, there was nothing to be done about it. He could only accept his reality and move on.

I wasn't someone who fancied passwords or app locks, especially because my former phone locked me out once when the screen had issues but that same day, I had to password all the apps on my phone and put all verifications and security checks in place.

Since it had happened before my eyes, there was no need for me to experience it before I learnt my lesson.

I realized that all the two-step and other kinds of verification that were available on certain apps were placed there because the app creators knew that there was a possibility that the cyber security could be overridden.

At the same time, I figured that it wasn't safe for anyone, anyone at all to have the passwords to your device. Since I couldn't keep my general phone password away from certain important people like my siblings and my boyfriend, I decided to use different passwords for the different apps on my phone along with my fingerprint.

I wasn't going to allow myself to become a victim, especially since I had seen how terrible cyber criminals were.