Viber account compromised without answering verification call or receiving SMS code – has anyone else experienced this?
I'm trying to understand what happened because this has been causing me a lot of anxiety.
Earlier this month, a friend told me that my Viber profile picture and display name had suddenly changed. When I opened Viber, I had to log in again from scratch. After getting back into my account, I saw that my profile picture had been changed to a photo of a blonde woman and my display name had been changed to a female name. I removed the picture and restored my name.
While checking everything, I noticed something strange. In my blocked contacts there was a blocked account with the exact same female name that had been set on my profile.
When I went to enable Viber's 2-step verification PIN, I noticed a message in the official Viber notifications chat from two days earlier that said:
**New Viber activity
You will receive an SMS with an activation code. If you did not request an SMS, you can ignore it and report it.
Remember, NEVER share your activation code with others!**
The timestamp on that notification was 8:06 AM.
Then I remembered that around that same time, two days earlier, I had received a random phone call from an unknown number early in the morning. At the time I assumed it might have been one of Viber's automated authorization calls, but I never answered it. I checked my call history, and the timestamp matched the Viber notification time exactly.
This is what I don't understand:
I never answered the authorization call.
I never received an SMS verification code.
I never shared any code with anyone.
Yet someone was still able to access my Viber account and change my profile.
How is that even possible? Is there some known method of bypassing Viber's verification process?
What made things even stranger was that about 3 minutes after I recovered my account, I received an explicit photo from an unknown phone number on Viber. Since then, I've also started receiving Viber notifications and SMS messages containing verification codes for random apps that I never tried to register for.
Then, last night, my mother told me she couldn't access her Viber account. When I helped her log in, I found the exact same situation:
Her profile picture had been changed.
Her display name had been changed.
There was a blocked contact with the same name as the one that had been assigned to her profile.
There was a "New Viber activity" notification that matched an unknown phone call at the same time.
She also never answered the call and never entered or shared any verification code.
The fact that this happened to both of us makes me think this isn't just an isolated incident.
Has anyone else experienced something similar recently? Does anyone know how an attacker could gain access to a Viber account without the victim answering the verification call or receiving/entering an SMS code?
I'd also appreciate any advice on what else I should check to make sure our accounts and phone numbers are secure.
Thank you for reading through this long post
P.S. I already contacted Viber support and they did nothing