New WhatsApp Bug Deletes Group Chat History, Update Your App Now

The latest bug to affect the popular messaging platform ensures attackers can delete your group chat history.

WhatsApp has been riddled with too many bugs in 2019.

(Photo: The Quint)

It has been a challenging year for WhatsApp, with too many mishaps causing concern for the users, as well as other entities across the globe.

And after the big reveal of Pegasus spyware infecting thousands of devices, a new report brings more issues for the Facebook-owned messaging platform.

Check Point Research on Tuesday has publicly confirmed a new bug on the app, which could not only crash your group chats but also delete the chat history from day one. This bug would allow the attacker to send a malicious group chat message that would crash the app for all members of the group, the security researchers mentioned via its report.

The firm also highlighted how the attack takes place, and how it needs access to one of your WhatsApp account, to be accessed through WhatsApp on Web.

“To create the malicious message that would impact a WhatsApp group, the bad actor would need to be a member of the target group (WhatsApp allows up to 256 users per group). From there, the bad actor would need to use WhatsApp Web and their web browser’s debugging tool to edit specific message parameters and send the edited text to the group. This edited message would cause a crash loop for group members, denying users access to all WhatsApp functions.”

<a href="https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/breakingapp-whatsapp-crash-data-loss-bug/">Check Point report on WhatsApp bug</a>

This issue can only be fixed if you delete the WhatsApp group with the malicious message, remove the existing WhatsApp version, and reinstall the latest one, with the fix for the problem.

“All WhatsApp users should update to the latest version of the app to protect themselves against this possible attack.”

Oded Vanunu, Head of Product Vulnerability Research, Check Point

Check Point claims it reported this bug to the WhatsApp bug bounty on 28 August, who acknowledged the vulnerability and released a fix for it via WhatsApp version 2.19.58. So, if you still don’t have this version or later, update the app right away.

WhatsApp caters to over 1.5 billion users across the globe, and Check Points claims that a staggering 65 billion messages are sent on the platform every day.