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This sort of thing blows my mind.

Any rough theories on how this sort of thing can happen? How can an app go from parsing metadata to executing foreign code?

It's called C. It's incredibly hard to write secure code in it.

I thought whatsapp was erlang?

I don’t imagine there being much Erlang in the iOS and Android clients.

Is there any C in WhatsApp?

Yes - all the media decoders are in C

Cool, that actually does sound like a rather large attack surface for an innocent-looking attachment to wind up executing code