Three billion WhatsApp users are at risk - an expert has developed a tool that could spy on everyone, and you would never know about it
Security expert here… This issa nothing Burger and will be fixed on the server side soon I expect. This is about spreading fear uncertainty and doubt. The research is academic in nature and the results are interesting, but this is only a side channel to reveal things like maybe you rough timezone and maybe a few correlations via connectivity quality. This is what they do if they need to confirm if a person uses the same phone number for example. And the could just look it up in the registry or maybe just call you…
This is not a widespread privacy concern, is not very practical to use, especially at scale and is early fixable. Its comparable to the traffic pattern analysis they do to confirm tor users identity if they found them but need supporting evidence. Its what’s left when the technology works as intended. So chill your paranoia.
IT hobbyist here. This guy knows his stuff. Dangerous attacks are the ones that are very low effort with medium to high reward. This attack is high effort and low reward. This is one of these trivia things, that you will virtually never see in the wild.
High effort is not a great thing to count on. Once these things are discovered there are all sorts of clever (or not so clever) ways to automate the effort away. Especially now with AI.
While I appreciate your refusal to spread panic, would you mind explaining what the attack does and why it’s a nothingburger, maybe even why it’s not practical? Because right now, you assert a lot of things without any explanation.
Not saying you’re wrong, but I think it’s good practice to not just rely on claims of authority
Very simplified: assume you send somebody a signal messages every second and observe the timing of the “delivered” icon. They do the same but the messages are invisible and they time the icon very exactly.
My phone has the exact symptoms described in this article… I don’t like this…
You can mitigate (but not entirely stop the technique) by WhatsApp Settings, select Privacy, go to Advanced, and enable “Block unknown account messages.” and also disabling read receipts.
You could also uninstall the app and see if your battery usage reduces, or check in your phone’s battery usage statistics for WhatsApp using a lot of it.
Shit… I can’t imagine anything that would prevent a service provider or government from doing this all the time to everyone.
