Do you use WhatsApp on your computer? You can now know if your account has been hacked. The Meta group has partnered with a security service to implement an extension to verify the integrity of your connection to your WhatsApp account. Here’s how.
Since the rollout of WhatsApp to browsers, Meta has seen an increase in its use via the web app. A change in usage that prompted the American giant to think about more security for its users. From this perspective, Meta has teamed up with Cloudflare, a company specializing in security, to launch Code Verify.
This new project, which takes the form of a web extension, allows you to check the integrity of your WhatsApp account in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Egde browsers. “No other end-to-end encrypted messaging service offers this level of security for people’s communications over the web. In addition to using Code Verify for WhatsApp Web, it is also offered as open source so that other services can also use it.”explained Meta in her press release.
How do you know if your account has been hacked?
To use the extension, the user just needs to pin it to their bookmarks bar in their browser. Once done, the Code Verify extension will analyze the code that is run when launching the WhatsApp web application, to determine if your account has been hacked: “If there are inconsistencies, Code Verify will notify the user”, the American group underlined. The internet user does not need to perform any further actions to start the analysis.
To alert the user, Code Verify is color coded: green to indicate there is no violation, orange to advise you to refresh the page and warn you that another extension may interfere with Code Verify checks. Finally, red indicates a problem with the code sent by WhatsApp Web.
The user must then click on “More information user manual” to find out how to fix the problem: “If the issue is not resolved, please log out of WhatsApp Web and use WhatsApp on your mobile device as your messages on the web may no longer be private. If you want to learn more about the issue, click on the red validation error warning and download the source code.”
The social networking giant, which has suffered numerous scandals related to data collection, wanted to reassure its users.
“The extension does not store any data, metadata, or user data and does not share any information with WhatsApp. It also does not read or open any messages you send or receive. In fact, neither WhatsApp nor Meta know if anyone has downloaded the Code Verify extension. In addition, the Code Verify extension never sends messages or chats between WhatsApp users to Cloudflare.”
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(ETX Daily Up)