If you’ve spent years sending private messages, videos and photos over WhatsApp on your iPhone, then you should think twice about switching to Android.

What Really Happened: With social distancing and self-quarantining becoming the norm around the world, the internet is becoming even more important in people’s lives as a tool with which to communicate, with platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook assuming even more central roles in how we talk to each other and share information—which makes it a problem when things start to go inexplicably wrong, disrupting that communication in worrying ways.

For the 2 billion of those people who also use the encrypted communication service WhatsApp, now more than ever is a time for calling, messaging, and seeking trustworthy information.Cathcart says WhatsApp's priority, even more so during the pandemic, is to elevate accurate information and support fact-checking organizations around the world.

In the early years co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton charged a $1 annual fee to use the service, but that didn’t stop WhatsApp from spreading, particularly in developing nations like Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa.

And the app was especially appealing to users in the UAE, because it didn't have the functionality restrictions that the Emirati government places on many other communication apps like Skype and Whatsapp in the country.

Government Officials in More Than 20 Countries Targeted via WhatsApp HackingLast May, WhatsApp revealed that hackers at NSO Group had been exploiting a vulnerability in its software that allowed them to compromise a phone simply by targeting it with a voice call that planted malware on the device capable of silently stealing a victim's messages.

That's how long scientists allowed frozen sperm to be in microgravity as part of a study on what human reproduction would look like in space.If you were buying a new car, wouldn't you want to have the best features, safety, and value for your money?

Turkey restricted access to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp in at least three cities in the southern part of the country for about 48 hours earlier this week as it launched an attack on northern Syria, according to data collected by civil society group NetBlocks and reviewed by WIRED.

Lily Hay Newman covers information security, digital privacy, and hacking for WIRED.Silvanovich, who worked on the research with fellow Project Zero member Samuel Groß, got interested in interaction-less bugs because of a recent, dramatic WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed nation-state spies to compromise a phone just by calling it—even if the recipient didn’t answer the call.

Also, much as WhatsApp and Instagram employees and users might not like it, merging the three brands also allows Zuckerberg to say that he’s doing what the world is asking of him.

Hackers got into pretty much everything, and Amazon is paying employees to quit. The NSO Group, an Israeli spy firm, injected malware onto targeted phones in order to steal data by simply placing a phone call.

But a new Financial Times report alleges that the notorious Israeli spy firm NSO Group developed a WhatsApp exploit that could inject malware onto targeted phones—and steal data from them—simply by calling them.

The decision by the Sri Lankan government this week to shut down the big social networks—including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Snapchat—in the aftermath of an Easter day terrorist attack on three Catholic churches and three upscale hotels feels like a turning point in our relationship with these platforms.

After a series of bombings killed over 300 people in Sri Lanka Easter Sunday, the country’s government blocked access to social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and the chat app Viber, according to state media and independent organizations that monitor internet blocks.

The lawyer told Congress, according to Cummings, that Kushner “took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council,” in order to comply with those laws.

In the past 24 hours, the company’s services, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus, froze for most of a day and a newspaper revealed that a new crop of prosecutors is investigating the company for criminal behavior related to a slew of data partnerships.

"If the goal is to allow cross-app traffic, and it’s not required to be encrypted, then what happens?" Matthew Green, Johns Hopkins University In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Thursday evening, Zuckerberg wrote that, "There’s no question that we collect some information for ads—but that information is generally important for security and operating our services as well." An indelible identity across Facebook's brands could have security benefits like enabling stronger anti-fraud protections.

New research shows that WhatsApp usage can exacerbate groupthink, sometimes mobilizing groups into acts of violence.Starting last spring, the platform began being linked to incidents of mob killings, most of which fit a similar pattern: People deemed to be “outsiders” were targeted by large mobs accusing them of being child kidnappers after rumors to be on the lookout circulated on WhatsApp. Some of these false rumors appeared in the form of highly convincing doctored bulletins from local police; others used the photos from Syria and manipulated videos.Killings occurred in May and June, but the high death toll in the Dhule incident marked a tipping point for the government.

Everyone you know is on the platform, and you can’t have social standing without being a user, as true for WhatsApp (outside the US) as it is for Facebook (inside the US).Smartphones as Extensions of Our BrainsThat’s made possible by another development for which WhatsApp’s timing was impeccable: the wiring of every human brain to a smartphone, and the endless reinforcement training—Pavlov’s dogs come to mind—that’s turned most of us into cognitive cyborgs, making the phone an extension of our brains.So even though WhatsApp is free of News Feed and ads, it contains the key functionality that reverts our brains to the heavily social and fragmented medium that predates the textual age of editors and encyclopedias.