Whatsapp | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

If you haven't heard by now, Facebook just made its biggest move ever, buying the messaging service WhatsApp in a deal worth some $19 billion. That's 19 times what Facebook paid for Instagram two years ago. The WhatsApp Service run by the team of just 32 engineers, handles more than 50 Billion messages daily, and approx 385 million active users. WhatsApp acquisition has also brought out fresh criticism over security for the billions of messages delivered on the platform. Security Researcher at Praetorian Labs identified several SSL-related security issues in WhatsApp application using Project Neptune , a mobile application security testing platform. " WhatsApp communication between your phone and our server is fully encrypted. We do not store your chat history on our servers. Once delivered successfully to your phone, chat messages are removed from our system ." Company said in a blog post . But researchers found that WhatsApp is vulnerable to Man-in-theMiddl

WhatsApp for Android added most awaited privacy option for all who do not want to display information about when they last used the app. This is the first impressive update of the  WhatsApp after acquisition by Facebook , who   has paid a lot of money in cash and stock to acquire it. The Popular Smartphone messaging application  WhatsApp version 2.11.169 will provide you more ability and control over privacy options i.e. Hiding ' last seen at ' time, Profile picture, status updates from others, which are currently visible for all WhatsApp users. Currently, these options are set to  'everyone'  by default, that allows any WhatsApp user to find out exactly when you used WhatsApp for the last time, also reveals your image and Status message. Most of the times we don't want it to be shown to anyone or to non-contact users. How to hide WhatsApp 'last seen at' time and Profile Picture? WhatsApp now allows you to Modify your Privacy settings in three wa

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Popular Smartphone Messaging app  WhatsApp 's $19 billion acquisition by Social Network giant Facebook  made Headlines this week. While Some are applauding the move, and many other users are worried about WhatsApp's future and their privacy after this acquisition. Why So Serious? WhatsApp currently having 450 million active users and processes 50 billion messages a day. Service charges a nominal service fee of $1/year, that means Facebook is buying at $42.22 per user. $19 Billion / 450 million users  = $42.22 per user These figures show ,  obviously future revenue from WhatsApp can't cover the acquisition cost in the short or mid-term. " You can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product. " WhatsApp founder said in a  blog post . So, What Facebook is

Cyber criminals are taking advantage of the widespread popularity of the mobile messaging app ' WhatsApp '. A malware expert at the Kaspersky Lab revealed a large-scale spamming campaign, advertising a fake PC version of the WhatsApp , to spread a banking trojan. According to the report, unaware users have received an email written in Portuguese language , it also tries to deceive the recipient with a social engineering tactic in which cyber criminals composed the malicious email informing that victims already have 11 pending friend invitations.  If users click on the " Baixar Agora " (Download Now) link in the spam email, they will be redirected to a Hightail.com URL to download the Trojan. Hightail is a cloud storage service, the malicious component deployed on it then downloads the malware via a server in Brazil. The file stored on Hightail server looks like a 64-bit installation file bundled with 2.5 megabyte MP3 file. According to Virus Total engine, onl

The Website of Word's most popular mobile messaging app and Antivirus Firm - AVG were hacked this morning and defaced by a new Palestinian Hacker group - KDMS Team, affiliated with Anonymous Group. The Defacement page titled 'You got Pwned', with Anonymous Logo and playing Palestinian national anthem in the page background, says:  we want to tell you that there is a land called Palestine on the earth this land has been stolen by Zionist do you know it ? Palestinian people has the right to live in peace Deserve to liberate their land and release all prisoners from israeli jails we want peace and " There Is No Full Security We Can Catch You ! " It seems that the hacker used DNS hijacking to point domains on a fake server with deface page. The  Whatsapp has resolved the issue, but at the time of writing AVG is still defaced. It is not clear that if any user data was compromised from AVG or Whatsapp. We have contacted WhatsApp and AVG

Viber was blocked last week for non-compliance by The government of Saudi Arabia and Now they may move to block Skype and WhatsApp in the coming weeks, if the U.S. based messaging provider fails to comply with requirements set by the country's telecom regulator. CITC confirmed that they could take the nasty step even before the holy month of Ramadan that commences on 9 July. " We have been communicating with WhatsApp and other similar communication platforms to get them to cooperate and comply with the Saudi telecom providers, however, nothing has come of this communication yet ." The main issue seems to be that such channels bypass Saudi's communications monitoring capabilities and consequently do not conform to local regulations.  Saudi Arabia's three main operators Saudi Telecom, Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) and Zain Saudi had been asked to tell CITC if they were able to monitor or block such applications. " We gave them a week to comply and have been co

If you own an iPhone or an Android device, then the chances are high that you're familiar with the extremely popular cross-platform messaging app, WhatsApp. According to a whitehat hacker Mohammed Saeed , Whatsapp media server ( media.whatsapp.com ) interface was vulnerable to Traversal local file inclusion. This vulnerability occurs when a page include is not properly sanitized, and allows directory traversal characters to be injected. Flaw allowed hacker to gather usernames via an " /etc/passwd " file and also another sensitive files like log files i.e   "/apache/logs/error.log" or " /apache/logs/access.log ". Flaw was reported by Mohammed with proof of conpect to Whatsapp security team on 27th May and was addressed this week. If you are also penetration tester and have something buggy that can help Whatsapp team to make there service more secure, feel free to contact them at  support@whatsapp.com .