Security News

Staff at NHS Lanarkshire - which serves over half a million Scottish residents - used WhatsApp to swap photos and personal info about patients, including children's names and addresses. This, the watchdog said, "Demonstrates that information governance expectations regarding WhatsApp were not understood by staff involved in the WhatsApp Group."

Hackers are using a fake Android app named 'SafeChat' to infect devices with spyware malware that steals call logs, texts, and GPS locations from phones. The Android spyware is suspected to be a variant of "Coverlm," which steals data from communication apps such as Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger.

We and our store and/or access information on a device, such as cookies and process personal data, such as unique identifiers and standard information sent by a device for personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, and audience insights, as well as to develop and improve products. With your permission we and our partners may use precise geolocation data and identification through device scanning.

Meta's WhatsApp has rolled out updates to its proxy feature, allowing more flexibility in the kind of content that can be shared in conversations. Support for proxy servers was officially launched by the messaging service earlier this January, thereby helping users circumvent government-imposed censorship and internet shutdowns and obtain indirect access to WhatsApp.

A new Android malware campaign spreading the latest version of GravityRAT has been underway since August 2022, infecting mobile devices with a trojanized chat app named 'BingeChat,' which attempts to steal data from victims' devices. According to ESET's researcher Lukas Stefanko, who analyzed a sample after receiving a tip from MalwareHunterTeam, one of the notable new additions spotted in the latest version of GravityRAT is stealing WhatsApp backup files.

An updated version of an Android remote access trojan dubbed GravityRAT has been found masquerading as messaging apps BingeChat and Chatico as part of a narrowly targeted campaign since June 2022. "Notable in the newly discovered campaign, GravityRAT can exfiltrate WhatsApp backups and receive commands to delete files," ESET researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a new report published today.

Meta has unveiled Chat Lock within WhatsApp, a feature that allows users to keep sensitive and intimate conversations safe from prying eyes. By tapping on a one-to-one or group conversation, users can easily enable Chat Lock and choose between password or biometric authentication options.

Chat Lock will create a new folder that can be locked with a password or biometric methods like a fingerprint. "Locking a chat takes that thread out of your inbox and puts it behind its own folder that can only be accessed with your device's password or biometric, like a fingerprint," WhatsApp said today.

India is the largest market for WhatsApp, with over 450 million users - many of whom have in the last couple of weeks received plenty of spam calls from overseas. Might scammers have turned to WhatsApp after conventional carriers hardened up?

E2E encryption means that only the person who stores the data should be able to read the data. Having dealt with E2E encryption of data during transit and at rest, we now turn to the more esoteric case of E2E encryption of data during computation.