In response to a query to Reuters, WhatsApp said, “We routinely engage with security researchers from around the world to ensure WhatsApp remains safe and reliable. We promptly issued a fix to the latest version of WhatsApp to resolve this issue.” An official working with WhatsApp further said that the company is not aware of the bug ever being used in any attack before it got patched. However, not everybody is on the same page as him. Travis Ormandy, who is a researcher at Google Project Zero has said that the bug is in fact a “bid deal”. For those unaware, the vulnerability in WhatsApp was discovered by Google Project Zero. “This is a big deal. Just answering a call from an attacker could completely compromise WhatsApp,” he said on Twitter.
— Tavis Ormandy (@taviso) October 9, 2018 Acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, WhatsApp enjoys the status of being the most popular instant messaging app and is used by more than 1.2 billion people across the world. In the last one year, Facebook has been involved in a number of security related issues. While 87 million of its users were affected in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, a security breach last week has affected almost 50 million accounts. Post the announcements, Facebook‘s shared went down by 1.2% at $155.94.
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