Hackers are increasingly targeting WhatsApp accounts. The Meta subsidiary now offers you three new options to better protect your account. We show you what you need to do.
WhatsApp has around two billion users worldwide. This puts the messenger service from Meta in third place among the world’s largest social networks and messengers.
But the more users a platform has, the more interesting it becomes for hacker attacks. Even WhatsApp is not immune to this, and its users can be confronted with the theft of their accounts.
WhatsApp now wants to counter this danger with three new options with which you can better protect your account with the messenger service. The goal is for chat histories to be “as private and secure as personal conversations,” according to the company itself.
Hackers: How to protect your WhatsApp account
If you want to transfer your account to a new smartphone or another device in the future, you will have to take another step. This is because the messenger will ask you to confirm the transfer on your old device.
This additional check can prevent third parties from transferring your account to a device that is not yours. In this way, you can protect your account from theft with a kind of two-factor authentication.
What happens if your smartphone is hacked?
WhatsApp has also created a solution for the case that third parties gain unauthorised access to your smartphone. In such a case, hackers could use your account to send – presumably unwanted – messages.
The app now has internal check functions for this. “They help authenticate your account without you having to do anything,” the messenger says.
WhatsApp: How secure are your conversations?
If you are not sure whether everything is above board during a conversation, you can also check the security of individual conversations in future.
This is where the automatic security codes come in. You can already use these manually. To do so, click on the name of your chat partner and select the menu item Encryption.
Your security code appears here, which you can either match manually with your conversation partner or scan via a QR code.
In the future, another function will provide more security at this point. If you click on the encryption option, WhatsApp will show you whether you are in a secure conversation.
