23 Dec, 2024

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp hit by massive worldwide outage

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp suffered a massive worldwide Wednesday afternoon, with services impacted in varying degrees based on user’s region. According to DownDetector, the outage occurred at approximately 12:40 PM ET, with many users unable to access the services through the websites and apps or send messages through WhatsApp. When users attempted to access Facebook, they were […]

1 min read

NSO Group used another WhatsApp zero-day after being sued, court docs say

Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group reportedly used multiple zero-day exploits, including an unknown one named “Erised,” that leveraged WhatsApp vulnerabilities to deploy Pegasus spyware in zero-click attacks, even after getting sued. Pegasus is NSO Group’s spyware platform (marketed as surveillance software for governments worldwide), with multiple software components that provide customers with extensive surveillance capabilities over […]

4 mins read

WhatsApp now encrypts contact databases for privacy-preserving synching

The WhatsApp messenger platform has introduced Identity Proof Linked Storage (IPLS), a new privacy-preserving encrypted storage system designed for contact management. The new system solves two long-standing problems WhatsApp users have been dealing with for years, namely the risk of losing their contact lists if they lose their phone and the inability to sync contacts between different […]

2 mins read

WhatsApp for Windows lets Python, PHP scripts execute with no warning

A security issue in the latest version of WhatsApp for Windows allows sending Python and PHP attachments that are executed without any warning when the recipient opens them. For the attack to be successful, Python needs to be installed, a prerequisite that may limit the targets to software developers, researchers, and power users. The problem […]

5 mins read