Pahang MB claims his phone line was hacked…but how?

Yesterday, Pahang Menteri Besar Dato’ Sri Wan Rosdy Wan Ismail issued a brief statement on his Facebook page stating that his mobile phone line was hacked. But what exactly does he mean by that?

For starters, getting your “mobile phone line” hacked is super vague if you really think about it. What exactly does that mean? How would you define “mobile phone line” or “talian telefon bimbit”? Well, if we’re going off conventional wisdom, that’s your mobile subscription, the thing that lets you make calls and connect to the internet.

But how does a service like that get “hacked” exactly? “Hacked” by itself is also a super vague word because it’s often the umbrella term used to refer to all sorts of breaches, hijacks, and even in some cases phishing scams over the internet. It’s also, unfortunately, a convenient word prominent people/institutions throw around to explain some controversial internet behaviour.

With a statement like that, we were left wondering:

How exactly did he get hacked?

Well, one way could be that someone managed to hijack his mobile line through something like a replacement SIM (requested via a fake ID or something along those lines). This would allow the attacker to override his current SIM and gain access to his number as well.

The other explanation could be down to something as simple as a misunderstanding of terminology. It could simply be that at the time that the statement was issued, the Pahang MB and his team has not figured out exactly what happened just yet, but needed something to clear the air. As a result, the vague “mobile line” getting hacked was a simple way to get the message across to his contacts that they may not be contacting the person they thought they were.

Based on a later report by Bernama (published on The Edge Markets), it certainly looks like this is the case. According to the national news agency, the MB’s police report confirms that it was his WhatsApp that was “hacked”.

According to the report, Wan Rosdy claimed that he only noticed the incident at 6am when he received a call from a staff member who wanted to check on him after finding inappropriate words on his WhatsApp application.

It also states that the attacker “hacked” his family’s WhatsApp group by changing its name before leaving the group, besides infiltrating “nine other groups”. Reportedly, the Pahang MB “switched off” his smartphone for “five minutes before restarting it again” and finding out that he could no longer log into his WhatsApp account.

Allegedly, Wan Rosdy received four messages in Spanish starting at 6.12am as well as voicemails and missed calls from unidentified foreign numbers. Beyond that, we don’t really have much more information.

So, how did this happen? We’re not entirely sure, but it could be something similar to the WhatsApp Hijack Scam that the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) warned about earlier this month.

This scam revolves around asking for someone’s personal verification code that WhatsApp will request when you login to your account with your mobile number. A couple of interesting points in the MB’s police report stand out, including the one where he “switched off the smartphone for five minutes before restarting it again”.

That’s an oddly specific thing to do unprompted, especially if you find out that someone’s trying to gain access to your account. But, if you consider the fact that it could have been a scam attempt, then maybe those were instructions given to him by the scammer in an attempt to buy time for them to access the MB’s account.

In any case, this is pure speculation at this point, given the limited amount of information being presented. The MB’s police report has been filed, so we’ll have to wait and see how the investigation pans out. In the meantime, what do you guys think of this? Let us know in the comments below.

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