What is mobile cloning? Know everything about it

Can authorities access your WhatsApp account? This question must have come to your mind when the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) issued summons to Deepika Padukone and Shraddha Kapoor on the basis of their 2017 WhatsApp chat. These chats were taken from the mobile phone of talent manager Jaya Shah. But the question arises that how were those chats retrieved from the phone? Many people believe that this might have been done with the help of mobile cloning. This is not a new technology but it has been in use for many years.

Mobile phone cloning has been in use for a long time. Through this technique, the data and cellular identity of the phone being cloned is copied to a new phone. However, cloning phones in private is illegal. Authorities resort to legal forensics to access user phone data. This process also enables the transfer of International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number.

Phone cloning requires only programming skills and within a few minutes the entire data of one phone is transferred to another device. Earlier it was necessary to hold the phone in hand to copy data, but in the advancing smartphone world this is no longer necessary. Now phone cloning can be done just by using the app, that too without touching the phone.

Once the cloning process is complete, WhatsApp chats from the old phone can be accessed from the new phone’s recent backup store in the cloud or from Google Drive in iCloud. It depends on which phone you have.

It is important to note that WhatsApp chats are encrypted on your phone and the conversations are also end-to-end encrypted. But this is not the case with WhatsApp backup, it is not encrypted by the Facebook-owned company.

WhatsApp has clearly stated in its FAQ post that the backup of the phone is linked to the phone number and Google account. This means that anyone can easily access the chats from your backup. However, in phone cloning, chats can be transferred through recent backup. Let me tell you, Huawei WhatsApp had specifically provided a process in its phones, where users could retrieve WhatsApp data from the backup by using the clone app that already came in the phone.