Do you use WhatsApp? With over a billion registered users worldwide, we’d say there’s a pretty decent chance that you do.
If so, we’d highly recommend updating as soon as possible, if you haven’t already. As noted over at The Register, a security flaw in the app allows attackers to crash your app remotely just by placing a WhatsApp call to your number.
That in itself isn’t much more than an inconvenience, and its pretty unlikely to affect you personally – but with Google’s research team describing the flaw as a “big deal” it’s better to be safe than sorry. It’s unclear at this point whether the flaw could be used by a malicious hacker to execute code on your device, which could compromise the app and all your data completely. Why take the risk?
If you have automatic updates on, you might be safe already, but if not you’ll want to manually check for an update to WhatsApp. You can do this from the Updates tab of the App Store, or by tapping this link to go straight to the WhatsApp page.