A well-liked and simple to use texting program is WhatsApp. It offers several security features, such as end-to-end encryption, that work to protect the confidentiality of your communications. Despite these strong security precautions, WhatsApp is still susceptible to attacks that could jeopardize the confidentiality of your messages and contacts.
We can avoid compromising ourselves if we are only aware of our weaknesses because knowledge is half the battle. Here are a few methods for hacking WhatsApp in order to achieve that.
1. Remote Code Execution via GIF
Security researcher Awakened revealed a WhatsApp flaw in October 2019 that allowed hackers to take control of the application using a GIF picture. When a user uses the Gallery view to share a media file, WhatsApp processes photographs in a certain way that is exploited by the hack.
When this occurs, the software analyzes the GIF to display a file preview. Because they include many encoded frames, GIF files are unique. As a result, code may be concealed within the image.
A user’s whole chat history may be compromised if a hacker sent them a malicious GIF. The users’ chat history and the messages they exchanged would be visible to the hackers. Users’ files, pictures, and videos sent using WhatsApp were also visible to them.
WhatsApp versions up to 2.19.230 on Android 8.1 and 9 were vulnerable. Thankfully, Awakened responsibly exposed the vulnerability, and Facebook, who owns WhatsApp, corrected the problem. Keep WhatsApp updated at all times to protect yourself from this issue.
2. The Pegasus Voice Call Attack
The Pegasus voice call exploit was a further WhatsApp vulnerability identified in the first few months of 2019.
In this alarming exploit, hackers might gain access to a device by making a simple WhatsApp phone call to their victim. The attack might still be successful if the target didn’t answer the call. And it’s possible that the victim isn’t even aware that malware has been put on their device.
This functioned using a technique called buffer overflow. Here, a small buffer is purposefully overloaded with code during an attack in order to “overflow” and write code to a region it shouldn’t be able to access. When a hacker has access to code in a place that ought to be secure, they might act maliciously.
3. Socially Engineered Attacks
Socially engineered assaults, which take advantage of psychological flaws in individuals to steal information or disseminate false information, are another way that WhatsApp is exposed.
One instance of this assault was made public by the security company Check Point Research, and it was dubbed FakesApp. This made it possible for users to modify the text of another user’s reply and abuse the group chat’s quotation feature. In essence, hackers might insert false statements that seem to be made by other trustworthy individuals.
The researchers were able to accomplish this by decrypting WhatsApp messages. They were able to view information transmitted between WhatsApp’s mobile app and website because to this.
4. Media File Jacking
Telegram and WhatsApp are equally impacted by media file jacking. This exploit makes use of the way media assets, such as images or movies, are received by apps to write those files to the device’s external storage.
The malware is first installed as part of the attack inside an app that first appears to be secure. Then, Telegram or WhatsApp can keep an eye on incoming files. The malware could replace the genuine file with a phony one when a new file is received.
The issue’s discoverer Symantec thinks it might be exploited to deceive people or disseminate false information.
But there is a simple solution to this problem. You should check under Settings and select Chat Settings when using WhatsApp. Next, locate the Save to Gallery option and confirm that it is turned off. You will be shielded from this vulnerability as a result. However, a real solution to the problem will need app developers to fundamentally alter how apps handle media files going forward.
5. Paid Third-Party Apps
You’d be astonished by how many legally sanctioned commercial programs have appeared on the market with the sole purpose of breaking into secure systems.
This could be carried out by large corporations targeting journalists and activists while collaborating with oppressive regimes, or by cybercriminals aiming to steal your personal information.
Your WhatsApp account can be easily hacked by programs like Spyzie and mSPY to obtain your personal information.
All that’s required is for you to buy, download, and activate the app on the target phone. Then, you may unobtrusively connect to your app dashboard via a web browser and access private WhatsApp information like messages, contacts, status updates, etc. Of course, we do not urge anyone to actually do this!