Three billion WhatsApp users are at risk - an expert has developed a tool that could spy on everyone, and you would never know about it
Three billion WhatsApp users are at risk - an expert has developed a tool that could spy on everyone, and you would never know about it
IT hobbyist here. This guy knows his stuff. Dangerous attacks are the ones that are very low effort with medium to high reward. This attack is high effort and low reward. This is one of these trivia things, that you will virtually never see in the wild.
This is not high effort. Starting from an open source WhatsApp client library, reproducing the attacks described in the research paper is trivial. There are even a few public github repos implementing PoCs of this.
Whether the reward should be considered high or low is ultimately subjective. What is objectively verifiable, however, is that an attacker can continuously (and silently) monitor several aspects of a target’s environment, including:
In addition, an attacker could deliberately drain the target’s phone battery and consume their mobile data allowance.
High effort is not a great thing to count on. Once these things are discovered there are all sorts of clever (or not so clever) ways to automate the effort away. Especially now with AI.