TOBY SHAPSHAK: How WhatsApp spied on you
Two months after Zuckerberg shifted focus to privacy, a WhatsApp spyware scare shows up the company
One missed call: that’s all it would have taken for your WhatsApp account and entire smartphone to be compromised by dodgy spyware. You didn’t even have to answer the call — it was that simple. The Facebook-owned messaging app used by 1.5-billion people discovered the flaw in its security last week. It’s a major blow for both smartphone security and Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, this year spelt out his vision for a "privacy-focused" social networking platform. "Within minutes of the missed call," wrote the Financial Times, which first revealed the exploit, "the phone starts revealing its encrypted content, mirrored on a computer screen halfway across the world. It then transmits back the most intimate details such as private messages and location and even turns on the camera and microphone to livestream meetings." And the targets wouldn’t even know they had been compromised. The circumstances are quite particular — a UK human rights lawyer involved in a lawsuit against the I...
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