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posted by janrinok on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can-fly,-allegedly dept.

Forbes staff reporter Thomas Fox-Brewster has an article (mirror here for those who won't turn off their ad blockers) reporting that Haifa-based spy tech company Wintego allegedly has the capability to break WhatsApp's encryption. From the article:

An Israeli company is marketing what appears to be an astonishing surveillance capability, claiming it can siphon off all WhatsApp chats, including encrypted communications, from phones within close proximity of a hidden Wi-Fi hacking device in a backpack.

Brochures leaked to FORBES, and published below, revealed a non-public offering from Haifa-based Wintego called CatchApp. It promises an "unprecedented capability" to break through WhatsApp encryption and grab everything from a target's account. It does so through a "man-in-the-middle" (MITM) attack; in theory the traffic is intercepted between the app and the WhatsApp server and somehow the encryption is decoded by the device, though that may not be possible with the latest upgrades to the software's cryptography.

According to the anonymous source who handed FORBES the documents, the product works on the most current versions of WhatsApp, noting the brochures were handed out at a policing event this year. They could not offer any proof of that claim, however, and the files may date from before WhatsApp added significantly stronger end-to-end encryption.


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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:41PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:41PM (#411108)

    agreed. Sounds like it could be a sales pitch - especially since Whatsapp uses the Signal code... Though, if it's windows surely this is redundant? - it's likely M$ baked in backdoors to meet the $NSL printer spool......

    Not saying it *cant* be cracked, but extraordinary claims....

    As a penguinista , I'm still waiting for the CPU microcode exploit that get's us all....

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