Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both of Indian origin and 17 years old, found this vulnerability in WhatsApp for sure will pop who is the victim of the issuer. They reported this bug to ‘ The Hacker News ‘, ensuring that via a written message with special characters may cause the application to stop, making it impossible to reopen the conversation.
In a video demonstration, they showed that how a 2000 words (2kb in size) message in special character set can crash Whatsapp messenger app. Previous it was discovered that sending a huge message ( greater than 7mb in size) on Whatsapp could crash victim device and app immediately, but using this new exploit attacker only need to send a very small size (approx 2kb) message to the victim.
The worried impact of the vulnerability is that the user who received the specially crafted message will have to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh chat, because opening the message keeps on crashing WhatsApp unless the chat is deleted completely
Unfortunately, if you want to talk with that person. The only solution is to open WhatsApp and go to the conversation without abrirla- and select to delete the record because otherwise, the message being in the conversation, it will be impossible to access it. As a last resort, you may decide to send it by e-mail.
Now imagine if someone hates WhatsApp groups and decides that no longer exist, all you have to do is send that special message to expel all the place and these look to disappear him
This bug has only been tested on Android and affects all subsequent versions KitKat, but has not been tested on iOS -for what is not descartado-, although Windows Phone 8.1 does not suffer from this uncomfortable situation. WhatsApp versions that are compromised are 2.11.431 and 2.11.432.
Recall that the messaging application has 600 million users, counted until October of this year. This vulnerability could affect more than 500 million of them, even when the company offered point to point encryption , and apparently forgot one small detail in experiences.
So far, the team WhatsApp has not made a statement on the matter, although it is likely that they are working on an update, because otherwise users will again choose other courier services, as the acclaimed this year: Telegram .
