The last thing anyone wants at today’s digital age is to let anyone snoop into your calls and listen what you are talking about. But it looks like Facebook Messenger already let hackers do that until recently when it patched the particular bug. The bug, which was discovered by Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich last month, reportedly affected Messenger's Android users only. It doesn't affect iOS users are safe.
All hacker needs to do is to initiate a call and send a unique ‘invisible’ message, which results them in listing to your audio. What’s worse is that they could do this even if you haven’t picked up the call. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. The vulnerability is said to require specific tools and not everyone can pull it off.
It has been explained that both the attacker and the victim need to log in to Messenger for Android and the victim additionally needs to be logged into Messenger through a web browser, for the hack to take place. And besides all this, the attacker would need the permission to call the victim, which means they need to be in the victim’s friend list for this.
Silvanovich added that similar bugs were found in other communication apps like Signal, Mocha, and JioChat. All these have been patched now.
This news comes a few days after the company unveiled ‘Vanish Mode’ in Messenger. The feature was announced almost a week ago and yesterday came to Instagram as well. This, as the name suggests, deletes the particular message or multiple messages once you leave the chat thread.