Think you are enjoying a private conversation on Whatsapp? not so much. Security expert believe that sharing private information via Whatapp on Android device can give hackers easy access to your information. According to Dutch Security Expert Bass Bosschert Whatsapp for Android devices save the chats on the SD card of the device and the information could be access by other apps.
“The Whatsapp Data is saved on the SD card which can be read by any Android application if the user allows it to access the SD card. Since Majority of the people allows everything on their android device, this is not much of a problem.” Bosschert writes in his blog.
The security expert posted the whole hacking process on his blog to demonstrate how easy it is to hack into personal details on any android. The fact that devices which run on Android operating system save the data in various part of the memory give an easy way in to data thief who wants to feed on your personal information.
Bosschert explains that the older version of Whatsapp did not use to encypt the data but the newer version adds that layer of security. However, the security expert explains that encrypted data could also be translated easily.
“Lately WhatsApp is using encryption to encrypt the database, so it can no longer be opened by SQLite. But we can simply decrypt this database using a simple python script. This script converts the crypted database to a plain SQLite3 database,”
The security breach is focused around Android because others like Apple and Windows phone have assigned storage space for their App. That means the data from app gets stored in allotted places and where other apps do not have easy access to them.
However, Android maker Google always tracking and screening apps for security breach any rough can easily steal your data once you install it. The best bet to avoid such incidents would be first, to download apps from trusted sources and secondly and more importantly not to put up important information in the Whatsapp chat in the first place.
