Major flaw of WhatsApp revealed, your data could have been hacked

The news of security bug being found in Facebook’s instant messaging app WhatsApp has come to light. It is being said that the hackers were accessing the device through a virus GIF file. According to a report by The Next Web, this threat was originally caused by a double-free bug in WhatsApp. WhatsApp says that the bug was fixed last month itself. The double-free bug corrupted the memory and caused the application to crash, giving hackers access to the user’s device.

According to Awakened’s post on GitHub, the bug was hidden in WhatsApp’s gallery view implementation. Let us tell you that it used to generate previews of photos, videos and GIFs. Research said that this bug was working properly till version 2.19.230 of WhatsApp, but the company had fixed this bug in version 2.19.244.

It is also mentioned in the report that it first used to create viral GIF files and then wait for the user to open the WhatsApp gallery. For your information, let us tell you that this bug worked on Android 8.1 and Android 9.0 OS but it did not work on Android 8.0 and below versions. This means smartphones running on OS below Android 8.0 were safe from this bug.

WhatsApp spokesperson The Next Web “This bug was reported last month and was quickly fixed through an update. We have no reason to believe that the bug affected users. However, we continue to encourage users to Committed to providing the latest security features.”