When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Future

WhatsApp: Popular Free Messaging Service Puts Users At Risk

Is someone about to hack your smartphone?
Is someone about to hack your smartphone?
Benedikt Fuest

For months, free smartphone instant messaging service WhatsApp has been topping the download charts. It is a favorite application for both iPhone and Android users. To the annoyance of cell phone providers, WhatsApp has become a kind of quasi replacement for the old fee-based SMS. According to WhatsApp developers, their servers handle over 10 billion messages per day.

However the service, which is run by small San Francisco start-up WhatsApp Inc., is neither as secure nor as failure-resistant as one would expect from a market leader. In his blog British web developer Sam Granger writes that any relatively ambitious hacker could get into WhatsApp accounts without a problem, either to intercept messages or send messages from their victim’s account.

This is because WhatsApp is set up to make the service friendly to new users who don’t have to provide their own combination of user name and password – they just use the existing info relating to their phone as login data. Telephone numbers are simply and clearly the basis for user names, and WhatsApp passwords -- at least on Android phones -- are clearly based on a phone’s IMEI serial number.

Granger discovered that to generate a password out of the IMEI number the app just changes the order of the digits – “your password is likely to be an inverse of your phones IMEI number with an MD5 cryptographic hash thrown on top of it.” What that means is that anybody who knows a phone’s IMEI number can figure out the password.

Many apps use IMEI numbers to identify phones, and any installed program can access that information and pass it on to an external database. In the event that what happened to iPhone this week (a hacker group released one million Apple UDIDs) happens to WhatsApp, and a database generated from the phone serial numbers were to be made public, WhatsApp user accounts would be compromised and become targets for spammers. Not that hackers have lost any time -- on gray market sites, databases of Android phone serial numbers and corresponding cell phone numbers are sold under the keyword WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has been criticized many times for its security loopholes. Until recently the app carried unencrypted messages through the net, and a simple program made it possible for them to be accessed from a Wi-Fi network. The app also stores message history unencrypted on the SD memory card of Android phones.

Another issue is that WhatsApp can be completely cut off from the mobile phone network. As this article goes to print, T-Mobile users cannot access WhatsApp after a T-Mobile update blocked the relevant network port. T-Mobile says this was accidental and service would be resumed as fast as possible.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Society

Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


Keep reading...Show less

The latest