Is WhatsApp Free of Cyber Crime? Think Again!

If you're using an Android mobile phone, chances are that you're in regular touch with your dear ones through WhatsApp? So what's the big deal, you might ask? Well, it’s now a matter of concern and users must be very careful about the information they share on this instant messaging app - WhatsApp. No form of digital communication is entirely secure nowadays, including mobile chat applications. By using miscreant apps and a few scripts, anyone can steal your chats and can check what you talked about with anyone.

A Dutch Security Consultant found out that all the WhatsApp chat logs are saved in the phone's SD card which is easily accessible and readable by other apps because of the way Android allows sharing of data between apps.

Any database which is saved on an Android SD card can be read by any other Android application if the user allows it to access the SD card and this is not at all a big task because majority of users allow access to everything on their mobile devices by default. This information was shared  by Bas Bosschert in one of his blogs. Further Bas Bosschert explained the answer to "What do we need to steal someone's WhatsApp database? For this, he highlighted that we just need a place to store the database, and an Android application which uploads the WhatsApp database onto a website." 

To elucidate, he created an Android Application by setting up a web server which required special permission from a user’s phone. But because Android OS allows applications to access various parts of the phone, as a result, users can conveniently share almost everything through any app on Android phone. Due to this glitch, his application didn’t find any difficulty in gaining access to WhatsApp data of other users.

Malicious users or hackers can easily use this method to gain access and breach the privacy of a WhatsApp user. Older versions of WhatsApp were so insecure that they didn't even encrypt their data stored on SD card and it could be read by anyone once it was uploaded on the web server. Even the new version of Whatsapp which uses encryption is not as safe since data can still be accessed with ease. 

The entire WhatsAppp database is a SQLite3 database which can be easily converted to Excel and can be accessed by anyone. Using a few smart tactics, even the encrypted databases are vulnerable to intruders.  Although iPhone or Windows phone devices give limited access to storage and hardware, their data is still exposed to rogue apps. 

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