Zero-click WhatsApp spyware targeted 90 journalists, says Meta

9to5mac.com

23 points·mikece··8 comments

>WhatsApp said it believed the so-called vector, or means by which the infection was delivered to users, was through a malicious pdf

So much drama could be saved by banning PDFs, one of the worst, most annoying and insecure file formats ever made. Thanks adobe!

Pdf may be the worst but it is widely known and adopted. Everyone has agreed on using pdf for sharing documents with each other, that is a blessing. Imagine having to deal with 10+ different formats because no one could agree on what to use, oh my god.

RTF (rich text format) existed and still exists and is good enough for what most people need without the option of embedding viruses.

10+ formats is better than 1 dumpster fire of vulnerable file format that has caused uncalulated damage.

People have certainly embedded zero click viruses similar to this one in RTF, here is an example from this year. https://www.offsec.com/blog/cve-2025-21298/

I guess we will never be able to have nice things.

RTF is a very old Microsoft created format that has heavy integration with legacy technologies. For instance it allows embedding of Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) objects into the file. Many of these legacy technologies were not designed with security in mind, so RTF would be an odd choice for a more secure alternative to PDF.

It is simple - disable downloads by default - I do it for audio/video and even files.

> Zero-click WhatsApp spyware targeted 90 journalists, says Meta

It is good that they are sitting and watch. Programming is hard. Testing is even harder. /s

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