Private WhatsApp Chats Allegedly Belonging to PM's Advisor Leaked Online

Private WhatsApp conversations attributed to Yonatan Urich, an advisor to the Prime Minister, were leaked to social media on Sunday. Urich himself has not yet responded to the alleged leak. The source that published the exchanges selected conversations with seven individuals from a large list of contacts and groups, claiming that more chats will be released soon. It is currently unclear who is behind the publication of Urich's conversations. It was recently revealed that Urich had connected his personal WhatsApp account to an external service from the United Arab Emirates, which allowed unencrypted, full access to his sensitive communications. According to that report, the exposure of the code for a media monitoring tool developed by Urich revealed access details that enabled foreign entities to infiltrate WhatsApp groups and extract confidential information. The service Urich used is subject to UAE laws, which permit local security authorities access to information and message content without a court order. However, it cannot be definitively determined if the leaked conversations, assuming they are authentic, are necessarily linked to this security breach. The tool, according to a separate report, was built by Urich for the Prime Minister and his wife to monitor real-time mentions of them in the media and send alerts to dedicated WhatsApp groups when necessary. Urich developed this tool using Anthropic's Claude AI model and it was exposed because Urich published the code on the GitHub development site. No response was provided on behalf of Urich.