Security News
Facebook's lawsuit against NSO Group over alleged spying on WhatsApp users will be allowed to go forward. WhatsApp-owner Facebook is alleging that NSO Group exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp to deploy its spyware against human rights activists, journalists and political dissidents.
Facebook won a significant legal victory on Thursday when the judge hearing the lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group declined to dismiss the case - and allowed the crucial discovery process to move forward. Last October, Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary sued NSO Group, and its Q Cyber Technologies affiliate, in the Northern District of California.
An infosec researcher reckons Whatsapp was a bit too quick off the mark to blame its users when hundreds of thousands of phone numbers, names and profile pictures were found to be easily accessible via Google. Athul Jayaram, a self-described "Full time bug bounty hunter", published a blog post earlier this week highlighting that a large number of Whatsapp users' mobile numbers could easily be found by searching Google for the domain "Wa.me".
UPDATE. A researcher is warning that a WhatsApp feature called "Click to Chat" puts users' mobile phone numbers at risk - by allowing Google Search to index them for anyone to find. The phone numbers are revealed as part of a URL string and so, this in effect "Leaks" the mobile phone numbers of WhatsApp users in plaintext, according to the researcher's view.
UPDATE. A new Android malware family has been discovered, which targets popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to gather intelligence on Android victims. Researchers assess with "High confidence" that the malware is operated by Wolf Research, a Germany-based spyware organization that develops and sells espionage-based malware to governments.
In an effort to stem what it says is misinformation being spread on its platform, WhatsApp is limiting the number of recipients to which its users can forward certain messages about the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, users of the Facebook-owned messaging app can only forward messages with double arrows - i.e., those that did not originate from a close contact - to one person rather than multiple WhatsApp contacts, according to a company post published Tuesday.
WhatsApp on Tuesday placed new limits on message forwarding as part of an effort to curb the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. The new policy limits users to forwarding certain messages to one "Chat" at a time, aiming to limit the rapid propagation of content which is provocative but likely to be false.
Last week we wrote about a WhatsApp hoax that was spreading widely, warning people to look out for a cybersecurity catastrophe that simply wasn't going to happen. The City of London Police in turn link you to UK National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Centre's ActionFraud website, where you will see that the "City of London Police hasn't issued any alerts about fake messages from Danske Bank.".
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An IT colleague has advised that a video comes out tomorrow from WhatsApp called martinelli do not open it , it hacks your phone and nothing will fix it. If you receive a message to update the WhatsApp to WhatsApp Gold, do not click!!!!!