WhatsApp – the eternal showcase of "no-gos"

WhatsApp can showcase some of the flags an application can present. A bug was reported in 2011, stating that communications within WhatsApp were not encrypted. A device connected to the same Wi-Fi network could access the communications between other devices. It took almost a year to get this bug fixed, a bug that was not especially complex to solve.

Later that year, a problem that allowed an attacker to impersonate a user and take control over his account was also reported. In January 2012, a hacker published a website that made it possible to change the status of any device with WhatsApp installed, if the phone number was known. The only measure taken by WhatsApp to fix this bug was to block the IP address of the website (as any reader can imagine, this is far from being an effective measure).

A big problem present for many years in WhatsApp is that the messages are stored in a local database. This was done in the external storage, which is the...