Beware: This WhatsApp feature can leak your photos

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WhatsApp to ring in New Year with festive update
Photo courtesy Reuters.

Exploiting a flaw in instant messaging application WhatsApp, hackers can access users’ private photos and chats by bypassing the app’s ‘View Once’ feature.

The View Once feature, introduced in 2022, was meant to further improve privacy by preventing any media and messages from being replayed or screenshotted or screen recorded.

However, cyber security experts at ZengoX Research claim that Meta is ignorant of this feature.

The team discovered that cyber attackers can easily save and share the duplicate messages in hacked WhatsApp accounts.

In a report published in Bleeping Computer, Zengo’s CTO Tel Berry said that his team responsibly disclosed these disclosures to Meta, but when the team realized that this flaw had been brutally exploited before then to protect WhatsApp users’ privacy this information made public.