WhatsApp’s defense against all this has been end-to-end encryption.
WhatsApp found itself caught up in the Apple privacy label debacle, when it transpired that it was way out of step with its peers on data collection- an issue compounded by a mandatory change of terms to enable Facebook to generate more revenue from WhatsApp. Which takes us back to end-to-end encryption. Its welcome new privacy labels are a scary, striking reminder as to just how much data we surrender to use the free apps that run our lives. Meanwhile, on the privacy front, there’s a battle taking place between the world’s largest tech giants-they’re fighting over your privacy, or lack thereof. WhatsApp has not yet confirmed it will issue a fix- right now the vulnerability remains live and users should beware. I have just published details of a shocking WhatsApp flaw that would enable an attacker to remotely disable a user’s WhatsApp account, deregistering their phone and then preventing them from getting back in.
There are echoes of that 2019 “unlikely problem” response from Facebook today. MORE FROM FORBES Instagram Confirms Security Issue Exposed User Accounts And Phone Numbers-Exclusive By null Further irony, then, in Facebook using my 2019 story “as evidence that it publicly acknowledged the 2019 Facebook contact importer breach,” as reported by Wired. At the time, the company admitted the flaw but nothing more, telling me it was a complex and unlikely exploit. Facebook has been heavily criticized for playing down the seriousness of this data exposure and for not informing all of those impacted users.īack in 2019, I reported on a vulnerability that allowed user phone numbers to be pulled from Facebook databases at scale. The issue wasn’t so much the data exposure this time, but rather the response. The data in this latest breach escaped from Facebook some years ago- it has been documented before, as have other such hyper-scale Facebook breaches.
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