WhatsApp is the most popular social network on the planet, with over 1.3 billion users worldwide, Facebook owning the company that develops the application and platform. WhatsApp is extremely popular in almost the whole world, but this popularity also generates quite big problems for the company that owns it, but also for those who use it daily for conversations.
WhatsApp is in the attention of many IT security companies, along with Telegram, iMessage, Signal, Facebook Messenger, Viber, or even WeChat. They are looking to buy exploits for all these platforms, having to allow them to intercept messages sent by users, and WhatsApp is at the center of this process thanks to the very large number of users in the network.
WhatsApp has a 500.000 dollar reward set by a company called Zerodium, which is willing to pay the money for an exploit unknown to the developer company. This exploit should allow those at Zerodium to intercept any kind of communications made through the WhatsApp application by any users, and this is where the very high price paid for the exploit comes from.
WhatsApp - the big problem of the platform's popularity
WhatsApp must be exploited with a zero-day vulnerability, that is, one that is not known by anyone other than the person who discovered it. This assures the people at Zerodium of the fact that no matter how much WhatsApp tries to discover the vulnerability, it would not be able to do it very easily because it does not know what to look for in order to be able to close it.
WhatsApp is an extremely important target because it is also very difficult to intercept messages published through it, and that is why Zerodium pays so well. Apart from the vulnerabilities for WhatsApp, the company pays up to 1.5 million dollars for untethered jailbreak solutions, but so far no one has managed to collect a single dollar from the American company for such software.
"Zerodium pays premium bounties and rewards to security researchers to acquire their original and previously unreported zero-day research affecting major operating systems, software, and devices," the company says. "While the majority of existing bug bounty programs accept almost any kind of vulnerabilities and PoCs but pay very low rewards, at Zerodium we focus on high-risk vulnerabilities with fully functional exploits, and we pay the highest rewards on the market."
WhatsApp is used to send billions of text messages, photos, or video clips every day, all through Facebook's servers, which also have the Messenger platform. Even if Zerodium will buy an exploit for WhatsApp, we won't find out too soon, but the application now has enough vulnerabilities that allow reading messages or other information available in the application.
WhatsApp is currently available for free download on the iOS and Android platforms, the latter being the most popular of all those for which there is now support.
