WhatsApp is the most popular messenger owned by Facebook. According to the official stats, the number of WhatsApp active users has reached 1 billion in 2020. Just imagine, approximately 65 million messages are sent via this social app daily. Since the app is so popular, it’s very attractive for hackers. In this article, I’ll tell you about the major WhatsApp security threats, which will help you protect your chats and shared media from hackers, WhatsApp spy apps, and keylogging software.

Unencrypted backup copies

WhatsApp message transmission is always encrypted, meaning that only the recipient and you can decode it. This feature doesn’t allow anybody, including Facebook, to access the transmitted data. Unfortunately, this doesn’t protect your chats once they are decrypted on your smartphone.

WhatsApp offers a back-up feature for all Android and iOS devices, enabling you to recover accidentally removed chats. Other than cloud-based backup, there’s also a local backup on your smartphone. If you’re an Android user, you can save your copies to GoogleDrive, and for iPhone users, Apple offers the well-known iCloud. The backup contains chats and messages decrypted on your device.

Backed up files on iCloud and Google Drive are unencrypted. These cloud-based services are theoretically vulnerable, which undermines WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption.

As we can’t choose our backup location, we are at the mercy of the cloud providers to keep the data safe and sound. And though there haven’t been massive hacking attacks on these cloud-based services, there’s no 100% warranty that your files are secure.

WhatsApp Web Service

Most cybercriminals use this service to access their targets’ WhatsApp chats. WhatsApp is available on the official website or as a desktop app when we can scan the code on the smartphone and start using the app on a computer.

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