Updated Meta's efforts to stop people repeatedly viewing WhatsApp’s so-called View Once messages – photos, videos, and voice recordings that disa

WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

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2024-09-18 20:00:04

Updated Meta's efforts to stop people repeatedly viewing WhatsApp’s so-called View Once messages – photos, videos, and voice recordings that disappear from chats after a recipient sees them – so far remain incomplete.

An interim fix deployed to stop people keeping hold of View Once data has been defeated in less than a week by white-hat hackers. WhatsApp says it's still working on addressing the vulnerability in full and changes made so far are stop-gap measures.

View Once was introduced in August 2021 as an optional privacy measure. But last week security flaw finders at cryptowallet startup Zengo went public with ways to revive seemingly self-destructed View Once material.

Zengo used Meta's bug bounty program in August to report the security weakness to WhatsApp, and heard nothing back. After spotting multiple pieces of software that were designed to exploit this flaw and harvest supposedly self-destructing pictures, the crypto concern publicly disclosed the details.

Essentially, the API servers treat View Once messages as normal messages but with a flag on them saying: Please only show this once. A rogue app or browser extension able to talk to those servers could just ignore that request, allowing the user to keep the data.