WhatsApp is a mega-convenient communication tool that is used by two billion people around the world. How it happened is hard to say. But due to the fact that the messenger had such a wide audience, the snowball effect worked, because of which new users literally stick themselves. After all, what's the point of switching to a more fashionable messenger, if all your friends stayed in it? That is why, for most users, the question of giving up WhatsApp is not even worth it. Founder Amazon Jeff Bezos once thought so. And completely in vain.
Apparently Jeff Bezos will no longer use WhatsApp
Jeff Bezos' smartphone was hacked using a malicious file sent via WhatsApp, writes The Guardian. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, is believed to be the likely sender of the virus. This information is not confirmed, however, the newspaper's interlocutors, close to the situation, claim that everything was exactly like that. True, it is not yet very clear whether Salman himself knew that he was sending his interlocutor a secret hacking tool.
How smartphones are hacked via WhatsApp
Communication with the Arab crown prince turned into big trouble for Bezos
The situation was as follows. In 2018, Bezos and Salman communicated via WhatsApp, and Salman sent his interlocutor a video that contained a hidden malicious file. After he got on Bezos's device, he immediately established a connection with the servers of his creators and within only a few hours sent them a colossal amount of confidential data of the entrepreneur stored in his smartphone. What exactly this data was is not specified.
A quick analysis of the problem showed that the infection of smartphones via WhatsApp occurs through a specially configured MP4 video. It got to the victim's device, after which it began to systematically send information to the buffer, this provoked its overflow and freeze, as a result of which it opened a backdoor for attackers to access the internal memory of the messenger and the infected device. All that remained for the hackers was to simply send all the data from the built-in storage to their servers, and then study it.
Can iPhone be hacked via WhatsApp
As it turned out, the backdoor could be opened not only in Android, but also in iOS, which endangered a huge number of users around the world. This was even confirmed Facebook, specifying that modifying files is, in principle, a very confusing phenomenon that even the most secure operating systems are unable to resist. Nevertheless, the developers reacted rather quickly and released an update with a bug fix.
But the irony of this story lies in the fact that information about a bug that allowed hacking users' smartphones via WhatsApp got publicly available only in November 2019, and Jeff Bezos was hacked back in 2018. It turns out that either the WhatsApp developers are so incompetent that their lack of professionalism led to the fact that such attacks were carried out without hindrance for a whole year, or WhatsApp is really a breeding ground for bugs and vulnerabilities, which is a real tracking tool for anyone who has sufficient qualifications. .