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WhatsApp, Signal, untraceable security risk (www.techradar.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works
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Three billion WhatsApp users are at risk - an expert has developed a tool that could spy on everyone, and you would never know about it

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[–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

It could be for mass espionage just by retaining metadata in a database and running continual analysis of it.

Then you'd start to see oatters and associations, so you know where to dig deeper.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    If you want "mass surveillance" with thousands of suspects, millions of requests per subject (the paper mentions 20 requests per second IIRC), over weeks ... you probably get blocked and/or caught.

    Also, your suspects will be "significantly unhappy" if your espionage costs them 11-18% of their battery per hour. Even without other usage, the battery would be dead by noon.

    And lastly, this attack uses so much bandwidth that video streaming is impacted. I would guess that it probably needs about 1 MBit, which is 11 GB per 24 hours.

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