WhatsApp is the world’s most popular social messaging platform, so having a bug or flaw in this online messaging service is a threat to the privacy of millions of users. We often get to hear about many bugs getting found on the WhatsApp app. And the latest one is that a hacker can get unauthorized access to the user’s media by sending GIF’s to him/her on WhatsApp.
More About This WhatsApp Bug
A security researcher who goes by the name Awakened found this bug. The blog post published the security researcher on GitHub, says that the bug discovered is a double-free vulnerability and only the Android platform has been affected by it.
The flaw was mainly present in the WhatsApp’s message preview feature which basically provides the partial view of the content received such as text messages, audio, video, and GIFs. For your knowledge, double-free vulnerability is a memory corruption issue that leads to malfunction of the app. Hackers can take advantage of this vulnerability and surpass the security and privacy of the user’s phone to get access to the device.
You will find this bug on WhatsApp version 2.19.230 running on Android 8.1 and 9.0. However, smartphone users having Android 8.0 and below are not affected by this flaw.
How To Get Rid Of This Flaw?
Awakened informed Facebook about the bug which he discovered. The company acknowledged and fixed the bug in WhatsApp version 2.19.244. So, you need to immediately head over to the Play Store and update your WhatsApp app to the latest version to get rid of the bug.
