WhatsApp has more than 1 billion of its users alerted about an extremely serious problem that has been discovered, and which allows their phones to be hacked without them knowing what is actually happening. According to some IT security experts, the WhatsApp application has a vulnerability that can be exploited with a GIF type image, and through it hackers can steal a variety of data from mobile phones.
WhatsApp is affected by a vulnerability that involves memory corruption, and if a hacker sends a specially modified GIF image, when the user opens the phone's photo library, the hack is done automatically. Only users of the Android operating system are affected by this extremely serious problem of the WhatsApp platform, so all those who have iOS are safe, so they cannot be attacked by hackers in any way.
WhatsApp ALERT SERIOUS PROBLEM IMPACTING 1 BILLION People
WhatsApp has learned about the problem, so any version greater than or equal to 2.19.244 is no longer affected, but those who have an earlier version are completely vulnerable to this extremely serious hack. Both Android 8.1 and Android 9 allow exploiting WhatsApp using this hack, but previous versions also cannot be exploited, and it is not known if Android 10 is vulnerable.
“The exploit works fine for Android 8.1 and 9.0, but does not work for Android 8.0 and below. In older versions of Android, dual-free might still be triggered. However, due to malloc calls being made by the system after a double free, the application crashes before we get to the point where we could control the PC registry."
WhatsApp is used by over 90% of Android 8.X and 9.X users, so over 1 billion people may have their phones hacked by hackers using this serious security issue. The vulnerability was revealed last month by WhatsApp, and at the end of the month they solved it, but there are still a lot of people who have not installed the update that solves the problems and secures the application.
WhatsApp tries to solve very quickly any kind of security problems that are reported to it, but unfortunately it does not manage to protect users in time every time.