How secure is the technology we use? As Mehul Srivastava discovered in a FT scoop that made headlines around the world, WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service used by more than a billion people around the world, had been compromised. The May 2019 story, the first in a series of reports through the year, revealed that WhatsApp had been hacked by a secretive spyware firm that allowed authoritarian and repressive regimes to target activists, dissidents and campaigners.