In the past few hours, WhatsApp, involved in a privacy problem and improperly used to convey a viral message, has distributed small improvements in the UWP version for PC, but above all started the roll-out of an awaited function on Android.
Like Instagram, WhatsApp also characterized the day of Thursday 21 April with several new features, some of which for the Desktop UWP version of its client, while others appear destined, after several preliminary sightings, for its iteration for Android. At the same time, the platform became involved, despite itself, in an annoying chain of St. Anthony and subject to a dangerous case of web scraping.
The first news for WhatsApp in this approach to the weekly queue concerns WhatsApp for Desktop, in the form of a UWP app downloadable from the Microsoft Store. The availability of the new beta release, numbered 2.2215.1.0, brings as a dowry, in the chat page, through the menu of and dots, the favorite messages button, which opens the section, now also implemented on PC, where the user can find all messages he has stigmatized as important.
With the same update, a renewed interface for voice calls similar to the one on the mobile side also arrives for users of this version of WhatsApp: in addition, the platform reported that it has introduced the button to send in the UWP version, in the recently added stickers section, recent stickers.
The second round of WhatsApp news is all about making sure that certain visual content doesn’t get to the wrong person. Previously, it was only from the camera card that additional recipients could be inserted: now, since the camera card will soon disappear to make room for the Communuty card, it was decided to allow the same thing by intervening on the indication of the recipients to whom they are sent photos and videos, which previously appeared small, under the media caption. With the beta update for Android, v2.22.10.6 (and in some cases also with the update 2.22.10.4), the indication of the recipients, enlarged, becomes a button. By pressing it, the user can change the recipient (without having to change the photo or redeem it), add others, and also decide to forward the content as a status update. Precisely in relation to the status, there comes a simplification of the way in which you can manage your audience, which no longer passes only through the privacy settings, but also provides a modal view (in practice a window with a choice to be taken, and then confirm everything as a sine qua non to move on to the next step).
Finally, some threats that have involved, in spite of himself, WhatsApp. In the past few days, a message has circulated through the green messages, indeed a chain of Saint Anthony, which fears the possibility, for 5,000 lucky extracts, of winning some prizes, granted by Milka (instead unrelated to the story), including even some chocolate as a gift. In this case, to get the reward, one would have to click on a disturbing Russian link, with the possibility of actually suffering advertising, spam, viruses, and subscriptions to subscription services.
The second threat, however, was reported by the Flashpoint security house, and concerns the opening, on the dark web, of the illegal market “Breach Forums”, where the user “pompompurin!” would have put up for sale an archive with 100 million telephone numbers associated with WhatsApp, with records also including the name and surname of the relevant user. According to the findings, 19 million of these numbers concern Italian users, again with name and surname.
The first hypotheses in this regard suggest that this archive may derive from the 2019 leak, which led unspecified hackers to put together the data of 533 million Facebook users, creating a 20 GB database spotted in 2021 and still shared via peer-to today. -peer (eg Torrent). It is therefore likely that through an automated check, a screening was carried out, to see which of the numbers of those 533 million Facebook users also had a correspondence on the WhatsApp chat-app. To check if your WhatsApp phone number is also circulating on the web at this time, you can check it via the “Have I been pwned” website.