Bad news for WhatsApp users on Android. If you chat on WhatsApp, it’s time to be careful and avoid getting too private. An IT security expert Bas Bosschert has discovered a critical vulnerability, allowing another Android apps to access and read all of a user’s chat conversations.
Vulnerability in WhatsApp Allows Hackers To Read Your Conversation and View Media
So how and what happens:
When you allow WhatsApp to build a back-up data for your chats in order to install the app on other computing devices, the back-up data is sent to WhatsApp database and is saved in the SD card of your smartphone. Now rather than building a unique password or code for each and every user, WhatsApp is using the exact same code for all of its users, which is a bad news because any developer can make an app to decrypt and penetrate in to the data including chats, images and videos. So as long as you grant the app permissions it asks for, your messages will be exposed to third-parties.
An important point is that this security flaw is affecting the Android users only. As far as the Apple‘s iOS is concerned, the app does the same thing, but Apple blocks all access to the WhatsApp database where the data is stored.
How it is done:
To learn how it is done, visit Bosschert’s official blog here.
How to avoid it?
According to my personal view, it is very simple to avoid getting your chats exposed to a third party. All you have to do is to NEVER download/use or allow an unknown/phony app on your Android phone.
