Whatsapp is currently the biggest and most popular messaging app in the whole
world with an estimated 500 million active users. Recently acquired by
Facebook on the biggest sale yet this year at a blowing 19 Billion
dollar deal.
Ideally by its nature of private chatting many people
trust the app’s usability to be safe and tamper free hence trusting it
more than online apps which can easily be hacked however security
experts have poked a loophole in the whole set that should get you
worried as a user,according to Mashable,it’s possible for others to
access your private WhatsApp chats through downloaded Android apps.
When
you use the app’s built-in back-up mechanism — let’s say to prevent
losing messages after uninstalling/reinstalling the app or moving them
to a new device
— WhatsApp is allegedly using the same encryption code to protect you
and everyone else (instead of creating a unique key for each user).
This
means the back up is going to a database with insecure storage and the
chats could potentially be read and stolen by another app. In theory,
the developer behind another app could decrypt and ultimately gain
access to
those messages.
Bosschert(the expert who exposed the loophole)
notes on his website that the WhatsApp database is saved on your phone’s
SD card, which can be read by any Android app if a user gives it access
to do so. This is a common practice in
the app space (apps that want to store non-secure data would be
interested), so if an app asks for SD card access many, in theory, would
.
Would you be worried if someone hacked into your Whatsapp account?
Why
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