Two Indian hackers have discovered a very serious vulnerability in WhatsApp. It allows a contact to block your app by simply sending a message. Chat blocks and the app crashes. How is this possible?
Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar are the two teenagers who discovered this bug in the app, shown on the video posted on the site. The Hacker News.
The procedure is very simple. Sending a particular 2 KB (fortunately undisclosed) message with special characters causes an error in the recipient's application. The only way to solve the problem is to completely erase the dialog.
Link to video
This issue happens on Android KitKat and earlier versions. In group messages, it can also force the recipient to leave the group.
How to solve the problem?
Easy, but you should be quick so that at no time the application will show the error message. You must click on the conversation the message came to, activate the options menu and delete the dialog. Once the chat has been deleted, WhatsApp returns to normal.
This bug has not been tested on all versions of WhatsApp, but has been confirmed on versions 2.11.431 and 2.11.432.
As a matter of fact, it's also good to make a backup of your messages on WhatsApp, so you won't miss a thing if someone sends you the infamous message.
. (tagsToTranslate) WhatsApp (t) Message (t) Error (t) Lock (t) Application (t) Failed