In my eyes WhatsApp is somewhat of a Bitcoin of secure the messaging space. They started on January 2009; 11 years ago and offered a great deal of features for its time and earned itself a good popularity. I would say WhatsApp even helped to advanced the modern communication just like how Bitcoin pioneered a great many things. But these days its value lies mostly in the network effect. WhatsApp has over 2 billion users and that is its main merit. There has barely been any revolutionary development for years and I bet your metadata is going to be milked to death for ads very soon. Let's not forget that end to end encryption means nobody is going to be able to spy on your messages when in transit. I'm no security expert, but what proof do you have to say that Facebook isn't been fed about the content after they get decrypted on the device?

Even Jeff Bezos Got His iPhone Hacked Through WhatsApp

WhatsApp Has A History of Getting Crashed By Text Messages

The above article was published on September 8th. The funny thing is if you searched for similar terms, you will find similar articles and videos describing how a simple text message can cause the app to crash and require re-installing. Imagine being in a group and having one of these messages shared. This is a tutorial from 2015:

Another Tutorial From Less Than 5 Months Ago

Imagine being acquired for $19 Billion USD and have an app that could be crashed by some idiot watching a YouTube tutorial. The other part to keep in mind is that we have to completely rely on the word of Facebook when it comes to the privacy and security implementations.

A Brief Collection of WhatsApp Hacks/Security Vulnerabilities From 2011 - Early 2020

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/15/14933048/whatsapp-telegram-hack-malware-image-checkpoint

https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/crash-your-friends-whatsapp-remotely_1.html

https://www.checkpoint.com/press/2019/check-point-research-leads-to-whatsapp-group-chat-crash-issue-fix

https://www.hackatrick.com/2015/02/multiple-vulneribilities-found-in.html

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/713.pdf

https://www.thelivemirror.com/zonel-sougaijam-rewarded-5000-for-discovering-whatsapp-bug

https://web.archive.org/web/20131105132110/http://www.wiretrip.org/2012/01/12/how-whatsappstatus-net-works

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/07/11/whatsapp-users-ignore-messages-from-priyanka-its-a-worm

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/09/18/nasty-whatsapp-privacy-surprise-delete-for-everyone-doesnt-delete-for-everyone/#44095ba05822

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11927

https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/18/whatsapp-major-security-flaw-need-take-urgent-action-protect-11176045

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/whatsapp-security-flaw-allows-anyone-to-track-you-regardless-of-your-privacy-settings-3662593.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34192117

https://web.archive.org/web/20110523235136/http://www.yourdailymac.net/2011/05/whatsapp-leaks-usernames-telephone-numbers-and-messages

https://thednetworks.com/2012/09/09/whatsapp-imei-password-md5-inverted-hack

https://web.archive.org/web/20150108072201/http://fileperms.org/whatsapp-is-broken-really-broken.html

https://www.perimeterx.com/tech-blog/2020/whatsapp-fs-read-vuln-disclosure

https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/black-hat-2019-whatsapp-protocol-decryption-for-chat-manipulation-and-more

https://www.ft.com/content/3c86ccde-3fac-11ea-bdb5-169ba7be433d

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/03/new-whatsapp-warning-security-flaw-confirmed1-billion-users-told-update-apps-now/#463a16d92582

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/technology/nso-group-whatsapp-spying.html

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2019/05/14/whatsapp-flaw-spyware-cve-2019-3568

Tl;DR

Some of the the most critical vulnerabilities were not patched for over an year.

This begs the question whether these were intentionally kept from being fixed. Intentionally creating vulnerabilities could result in massive complications and I doubt anyone at Facebook is willing to take that risk. But looking the other way, incompetence and intentionally picking lesser security can go a long way running your personal life.

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