The Facebook-owned company, which boasts 1.5 billion users worldwide and 200 million users in India, has confirmed that a vulnerability in WhatsApp opened doors for a spyware attack that installs a malicious code on victim’s smartphone by calling them on WhatsApp. The breach was first reported by Financial Times, indicating that the spyware gets installed on a user’s phone through calls, even if the user misses a call. The report further claims that the malicious code behind the spyware attack was developed by the NSO Group, an Israeli software company that has recently been accused by Amnesty International for making spyware products used to target human rights activists worldwide. While WhatsApp is yet to confirm how many users were exactly affected, they believe only a select number of users were targeted. WhatsApp has made changes to the infrastructure to deny the ability for this attack to take place.

Source: Mint May 14, 2019 14:29 UTC