A lot of talk went down yesterday about a new way to exploit WhatsApp and bypass the end-to-end encryption the company likes to mention that it has whenever it can. I've seen tweets and comments that run the gamut from "it's FUD" to talking about some backdoor that Facebook had installed.
Messages purporting to be WhatsApp invitations to try out a new voice calling feature are actually nothing more than malware conduits.
WhatsApp, one of the biggest third-party instant messaging app in the world, had 700 million active users sending 30 billion messages per day, as of January 2015, making it a popular target for scammers and hackers. To boot, it has started to roll out the hotly anticipated Free Voice Calling feature—which will add a VoIP capability to make calls, a la Skype and Viber. It’s available for Android, but it’s only invite-only for now.
Mobile messaging platform WhatsApp has accumulated more than 700 million monthly active users and seems on track to reach 1 billion in about a year, a target Facebook set when it acquired the company in 2014.
The announcement comes about 11 months after Facebook acquired the app for $16 billion, a move that reflected the importance that Facebook places on mobile users.
Despite pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook is unlikely to leave WhatsApp's stricter privacy policies intact, once government regulators approve the $19 billion acquisition, privacy experts say.
Late last week, Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, sent Facebook a letter, warning the social network that it must abide by the privacy promises WhatsApp made to users of its instant messaging service.
Thanks to last month’s big Facebook acquisition, WhatsApp has been attracting a lot of attention lately. While that should only help grow its already impressively large 450-million-person-strong user base, that extra attention also means that more people are placing the app under a critical light. Today we learn of a potential security vulnerability in how WhatsApp saves logs of your conversations; what exactly is the problem here, and is it one you need to be concerned about?
WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service Facebook just bought for US$19 billion, has several security weaknesses that experts say are worth addressing.
None of the flaws found this week by app security vendor Praetorian are critical. Instead, they represent lapses in best practices for securing mobile apps.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum on Sunday issued an apology and blamed a network router for Saturday's outage of the mobile messaging app.
"We are sorry about the downtime," wrote Koum. "It has been our longest and biggest outage in years. It was caused by a network router fault which cascaded into our servers."
Facebook is buying WhatsApp, agreeing to pay $19 billion in cash and stock for the popular smartphone messaging service.
In a statement issued late Monday, popular messaging app WhatsApp denied claims that Google was in advanced talks to purchase the firm, the second time such a rumor has been debunked in recent memory.
WhatsApp's Neeraj Arora, the company's head of business development, told AllThingsD that sales talks are not being held with Google.
It was reported on Sunday that the data-based messaging giant was well into negotiations with Google, which was supposedly considering a buyout worth $1 billion. Digital Trends published the report citing an anonymous source.
Google is said to be well into negotiations with the team behind WhatsApp, with the search giant reportedly considering a $1 billion price tag for the popular cross-platform messaging app.
