Few months back, Indrajeet Bhuyan found privacy issues in Whatsapp Web and found a way to crash Whatsapp mobile apps with small text message. Now, he has found another way to crash Whatsapp mobile apps with a new kind of message. He calls it “Whatsapp Crash V2.”
Indrajeet has basically overflowed the memory of the app by sending long message with thousands of smileys. He used Whatsapp web to create a long message with thousands of smileys and sent it to a person. When the other person tries to access the message, app will fail to handle such a long message and will stop working it.
“Whatsapp allows 65500-6600 characters.But after typing about 4200-4400 smiley browser starts to slow down. but since the limit is not yet reached so Whatsapp allows to go on inserting. so it crashes while we type and send,” He said.
Whatsapp for Android was crashing but on iOS it was not showing crashes. He confirmed that iOS app was causing iPhone to freeze and stop responding for few minutes.
Indrajeet also confirmed the impact.
“Suppose an attacker have send an abusive message or is blackmailing a victim. now the victim cannot show the message as proof as once the victim receive the smiley ( shown in video ) the whole chat with the attacker would crash and the victim wont be able to open it,” he said.
