By Analysts at Israeli Cybersecurity Company Checkpoint stated on Wednesday that they had identified a bug in WhatsApp that could permit attackers to amend and send fake messages in the famous social messaging app. It was further stated that the flaw gives an attacker the probability to divert and control messages sent by those in a group or private chat in addition to generate and spread misinformation.
The report of the vulnerability arises as the Facebook-owned is approaching under accumulating inspection as a means of scattering misinformation because of its familiarity and suitability for forwarding messages to targeted groups.
The app declared restrictions of forwarding messages following risks previous month by the Indian government to proceed action after more than twenty people were slaughtered by crazed mobs after being blamed of kid kidnapping and other criminalities in viral messages spread wildly on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp said in a statement: “We carefully reviewed this issue and it’s the equivalent of altering an email to make it look like something a person never wrote.”
However, WhatsApps said: “This claim has nothing to do with the security of end-to-end encryption, which ensures only the sender and recipient can read messages sent on WhatsApp.”
The app indicated it newly employed a limit on promoting content, enhanced a label to forwarded messages, and created a series of variations to group conversations so as to confront the challenge of misinformation. Established in 2009 and in 2014, Facebook purchased it. WhatsApp stated that at the initial year it had more than 1.5 billion customers who switched 65 billion messages per day.