Is something unusual and unwanted happening with you while chatting with your family and friends via the popular messaging app, WhatsApp? According to the announcement made by the researchers of cybersecurity in Israel called as CheckPoint Research, WhatsApp is detected with a flaw that allows hackers or intruders to alter the original messages send by the users and forward it to the recipient without their knowledge.
This new bug allows the hackers to manipulate and intrude messages send in the group or personal chats as well as give rise to fake information or data. On the other hand, recipients of the message may think it’s you and not the hacker who is sending them those messages.
Researchers of the bug say, “WhatsApp should fix this bug on a priority basis as it may be a huge pool of misinformation.”The messaging giant is mindful of the flaw, but still sits behind as the detected susceptibility forms the part of application design.
WhatsApp was founded in the year 2009 while it was taken by the tech giant, Facebook in 2014. The company said they spotted 65 billion messages altered per day at the start of this year. The claim is independent on security end-to-end encryption. Hence, the company confirmed that the messages will be visible only to the senders and the recipient.
To break down the convention of forwarding of fake messages, WhatsApp recently rolled out a trending feature called as a forwarding limit. Additionally, they introduced the forward label feature that clearly tells if the message is self-composed or forwarded. There were several scandals taking place in the society that promoted the publicity of fake news. Among them were fake child kidnapping gang and other related crimes. WhatsApp said, “We are keenly observing this matter and that equal to changing the original email so that it looks like something a person never wrote.”
The flaw detected in the application is very minute but the dangerous ones. It involves a gap within the application’s encryption algorithm. The ‘quote’ feature can even change the identity of the sender that means it seems to have come from the user who was never a part of that group. WhatsApp has accepted several other challenges to tackle the problem of spreading misinformation.
Well, WhatsApp has not announced when they will keenly look into the matter but that day might come soon as the company needs to think of their reputation as well.
