Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 11-10-2018

Social media platform WhatsApp says it has fixed the latest bug on its platform that allowed hackers to take over users’ applications when they answered an incoming video call.

Reuters reports that the announcement by the Facebook owned company follows reports from technology websites ZDnet and The Register.

The websites reported that the vulnerability, which affected WhatsApp applications on Apple and Android smartphones, was discovered in late August and was fixed by Facebook in early October.

In a statement to Reuters, WhatsApp said: “We routinely engage with security researchers from around the world to ensure WhatsApp remains safe and reliable. We promptly issued a fix to the latest version of WhatsApp to resolve this issue.”

While a WhatsApp employee familiar with dealing of the issue said there was no evidence that hackers actually exploited the bug to launch attacks, Travis Ormandy,a researcher at Google Project Zero which discovered the bug, called it a “big deal,” on Twitter.

“Just ++answering a call from an attacker could completely compromise WhatsApp.”

WhatsApp which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion is used by more than 1.2 billion people around the world and is a key tool for communications and commerce in many countries.

Twitter: @FaizelPatel143