Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

At least 1.5 billion people worldwide use it at least once a month, and more than 1 billion use it daily. WhatsApp isn't always as "reliable" and "secure" as Facebook hopes. Back in 2014, the instant messaging app was acquired by Mark Zuckerberg's social media giant. It disappeared from Google Play Store, but in the months leading up to its mysterious (temporary) disappearance, security researchers discovered a number of horrific vulnerabilities.

On August 28, a research team at the same checkpoint "responsibly"(read privately) disclosed another vulnerability to the company. The vulnerability publicly proved a previous security flaw, which gave WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Facebook, a chance to fix the problem and be exploited before it could.

Although this bug fix was carefully introduced to the public in mid-September as part of the app update for version 2.19.58, many WhatsApp users are still vulnerable to attacks by "bad guys" who for some reason try to prevent you from opening the IM app. To avoid this, you just need to make sure you have the latest version of WhatsApp installed on your Android phone or iPhone.

Otherwise, all it takes to make an application unusable is to create an innocent-looking message with some specific parameters edited in the debugging tool, and then send malicious text to groups that include bad actors. The last part sounds tricky, but it's often difficult to track the identity and intent of each member in each Group chats, as up to 256 users are allowed to join any given WhatsApp group.

Once the malicious message hits the target user base, the victims of this incredibly efficient attack are rendered useless. Instead, uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp to regain access to the app. The worst part is deleting groups that contain incorrect text. Third, to avoid this terrible threat, what you have to do is keep your application up to date. Even without such a revelation, you should do so, because smaller but sometimes equally important security enhancements are often used in new versions of WhatsApp.

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