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In November 2015, a fake WhatsApp video doing rounds in Amravati, nearly 685 km by road from Mumbai, led to a riot-like situation in the town. Later in September 2016, another false message of a communal clash in suburban Malad had the financial capital on tenterhooks.
In both the cases, police arrested many on charges of attempt to disrupt communal harmony. Many of those arrested, according to cyber crime experts, allegedly were those who had unwittingly forwarded the message, while originators escapes the law. Or, according to cyber cell, the admin of the WhatsApp group is considered the culprit.
“This is because it is difficult to track the original sender or creator of a WhatsApp message. One reason is that the company’s database servers are based out in the US, and importantly there are encryption technologies that make it difficult to track. Further, there are a number of applications – like Ccleaner and Data Wipe – to remove evidences and trails of a message,” Falgun M. Rathod, Managing Director at Cyber Octet, an information security company.
“A log and a time stamp is required to trace the originator, which is always not available,” Rathod, who also works Cyber Crime Cells of various States as consultant, added.
WhatsApp, a company owned by Facebook, does not store messages once they are delivered, so there are no ways to access the information of the originator. However, it has a dedicated channel to accept requests from law enforcement agencies and responds in accordance with applicable laws. When contacted WhatsApp declined to comment.
VPN techFurther, much like in a desktop or a laptop, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) – a virtualised extension of a private network across a public network that enables users to send and receive data across shared networks — is created on the mobile network.
“On a mobile VPN, it’s easy to fake IP address or change it. These create loop over loop effect in all applications including chat clients such as WhatsApp, especially when a message is forwarded, and trying to trace it will throw up multiple IP addresses,” Altaf Halde, Managing Director (South Asia) at Russian multinational cyber security firm Kaspersky, said.
“The origination of a WhatsApp message cannot be traced. To the best of my knowledge, a WhatsApp account is linked to a phone number and Internet, and not to a device. Further it does not use a phone number for validation and, therefore, it is not safe,” said Amit Agarwal, head, financial lines at JLT Independent Insurance Brokers.
“Technology is not developed to be misused, but it ends up being so,” JLT’s Agarwal added.
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