Fileperms:
WhatsApp, the extremely popular instant messaging service for smartphones that delivers more than ~1billion messages per day has some serious security problems. I will try to give a detailed analysis on some of the issues.
I’m not smart enough to be able to tell if this article is correct so it’s passed along for your information.
The German computer magazine “c’t” reported on this on friday in similar terms. It’s the most knowledgable computer mag in Germany (think “Science” for computer nerds) so I trust their report.
It’s really wise to prevent your phone from joining unlocked Wifi networks. As far as I can tell the only thing a hacker needs on iOS is the device’s MAC address for the WLAN device and that’s transmitted with every packet that’s sent into the WLAN network.
On Android you need the device ID so as far as I can tell you need the device in-hand to run programs from the Play store to get the info on the screen. So basically at the moment iOS is really vunerable, Android not that much as long as you don’t hand your phone to others.