Do you want to have some fun with your friends by irritating them with WhatsApp? Yes, there’s a new security loophole for that now. Indrajeet Bhuyan, a security researcher, has made a new discovery that can allow you to crash the WhatsApp app on someone’s smartphone.
Doing it is very simple. All you need to do is launch the web version of WhatsApp and send an emoji message to another WhatsApp user with at least 5000 emojis in the message. If the other person is using WhatsApp on his smartphone, the app will crash on receiving such a message, and it will force close by itself. The only way to use WhatsApp again on such a phone is to delete the message history and open the conversation again.
But there’s some catch in this. This bug is present only in the Android version of WhatsApp, so iOS or Windows users won’t face such an app crash. Also, there’s a 6000 character limit in WhatsApp, but as mentioned before, an app-crashing message requires only at least or more than 5000 emojis.
An interesting thing about such a sneak attack is that the crashing message you send to another device also gets deleted in the process, which is why the other user will not get to know how the app crashed on his or her phone. We expect Facebook to resolve this bug through a patch soon.