Whatsapp infestation deleting chat history, crashing group chats

The go-to chat app for most, WhatsApp has been overrun by a bug infestation, researchers found that this vulnerability could lead to app crash in loop forcing users to reinstall the app and losing the chat history forever.

Privacy-related issues and bugs are common these days cybersecurity researchers spotted the vulnerability in the app which can cause the app to crash on multiple phones in a shared group.

The vulnerability that has been fixed by the chat company now could have been exploited by the malicious hackers through the use of WhatsApp Web and a debugging tool like Chrome’s DevTools to gain access to a specific message parameter and lead to crashing of the app in the loop.

“In WhatsApp there are many important groups with valuable content. If an attacker uses this technique and crashes one of these groups all chat history will be gone and further communication would be impossible.

The impact of this vulnerability is potentially tremendous, since WhatsApp is the main communication service for many people. Thus, the bug compromises the availability of the app which is a crucial for our daily activities.

In order to recover from the issue, the users have to uninstall WhatsApp, install it again and remove the group which contains the malicious payload,” said the security researchers in the report.

WhatsApp has fixed the bug starting from its Android version number 2.19.58.

“Thanks to the responsible submission from Check Point to our bug bounty programme, we quickly resolved this issue for all WhatsApp apps in mid-September,” said the app developers.